


Rootabaga Country

by nimmieamee



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, M/M, not trk-compliant, other characters very briefly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-04-14 01:02:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 61,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4544136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you can strand a dream thing in the real world, then you can trap a real thing in a dream world.</p><p>That's logic as dreams know and use it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Real things trapped in dreams is all [dtriad's](dtriad.tumblr.com) idea, not my own, and many thanks for it. Rootabaga Country is from Carl Sandburg and would more properly be used for a story about the midwest, but I am bad at allusions so I'm using it here. 
> 
> I can't remember if Gansey chills in Blue's bedroom in BLLB, but if he does, then I will probably come back and edit that paragraph to reflect that.

Dreaming for yourself can be dangerous, but dreaming for others is greater hazard yet. 

Ronan Lynch knew this.

His loyalty was stronger than his knowledge. His room at Monmouth overflowed. It had EpiPens and aerosol cans full of bee repellent. It had lanterns for dark caverns full of lost mothers, and ugly crocheted girls' sweaters made of strange yarn as impenetrable as armor. It had t-shirts and sandwiches for hungry boys, several cassette tapes, the keys to an empty condominium in Washington, DC. A functioning floor fan with no electrical cord; the cost of a year's tuition plus board plus a generous donation for any Ivy League; a full set of Transformers' toys, which Ronan had never cared for, personally; hand cream. Power tools. New textbooks. A new school sweater.

To say that Ronan had a crush would be incorrect. He was not crushed. He had passed out of that phase, and was presently razed, demolished, possibly liquidated completely.

"Could I get a transformer?" said Noah. He picked up a yellow transformer. It clucked at him. A dream sound.

"Shut up. Help me get rid of it," Ronan told him in response.

It had been a long night. Ronan, more in control of his abilities than ever before, had somehow managed to fuck up, dream by accident again. Stress. Fury. A banked explosion. Declan was in town and wanted to talk. Ronan did not want talk, didn't see that Declan had any right to demand talk, and generally gave no impression that talk would be forthcoming.

His deep antipathy to talk came out at night, manifested in loyalty to people far greater than Declan Lynch.

Noah now obligingly scooped up the transformer set. Ronan didn't often dream for Noah. Nothing was really wrong with Noah except that he was dead and had stuck around anyway. Ronan approved of this. 

They left the EpiPens and the repellent, one hideous sweater with loopy knit like silver chain mail, and the thin sandwiches. The rest they took down to Monmouth's ground floor, where a large incinerator sat in defiance of Monmouth Manufacturing. It passive aggressively insisted that once the building had committed its fair share of Monmouth Destruction. Monmouth Conflagration.

The incinerator had needed several things to get working, so Ronan had dreamed those things, or something close to. It was easy to fire it up and dump in anything that so much as suggested that he'd ever dreamed anything for Adam Parrish. Adam was the kind of person who preferred to dream for himself. So the incinerator devoured everything: the crest on the sweater, the improbable fan, the money, the toys Adam's parents would never have been able to afford and wouldn't have bought him even if they had. Ronan liked the timing of the flames because they were timeless. The destruction occurred both quickly and slowly. Some pieces melted, others crumbled, others popped and cracked and were gone in an instant. 

Gansey didn't know that the incinerator was here. He didn't need to, so he didn't know. When he needed to know, then he would, because he was Gansey and good at finding things he wanted to find. But when it didn't occur to him to look for something then it was like the unlooked-for thing didn't exist. Gansey created the world when he looked for it.

Ronan did his fair share of creation, but his wasn't always so purposeful.

"You could dream better stuff than this," Noah said. He frowned sadly at the clucking, melting transformer. "Food, clean energy, BMWs that grow on trees--"

_Bombs_ , Ronan thought, uneasy.

"Bombs," Noah agreed.

"I could dream a priest to come and do an exorcism on this house," Ronan suggested. 

He could probably just invite the priest.

"You wouldn't," Noah said.

He was right. They stood watching the flames. Ronan wondered if the flames would hurt Noah and Noah tested the theory, poking one clammy finger into the incinerator and emerging unscathed. You couldn't burn something that was already dead. 

"This is why I don't need to dream you shit," Ronan concluded.

"You don't really need to dream him shit either," said Noah.

In response, Ronan picked up an abandoned wooden table leg, touched the tip to the dying flames, and tried to set Noah's sweater on fire. It wouldn't light.

"Do my feet," Noah suggested.

There was no point to this beyond assuring Noah that death had given him a small degree of indestructibility. So Ronan did it. He liked that Noah wouldn't char up and burn away. Ghostliness made Noah function less like a person and more like a thought. Dream rules.

But in time the fire died down, the dream objects dead with it, and Ronan tossed away the table leg. Parts of Noah smoked faintly, but he didn't seem hurt and his uniform was completely intact. Ronan switched off the incinerator and started for the door. Noah followed agreeably.

They heard Adam Parrish's shitty car before they saw it. It sounded ill, though Ronan was no car doctor. He'd never needed to fix a car or cajole a car, take its pulse or offer it vaccinations. He was only good at pushing it to the point where its patience snapped entirely, then dreaming himself a replacement. But he reflected that Adam could very well fix whatever made this car sound so cranky. Though on the one hand: this car was certainly not worth the fix. And on the other Adam could have fixed it -- that was what Adam did -- but if Adam was busy then he wasn't going to waste time on himself. Adam was always busy. Adam was an elegant conundrum, so ruthless in pursuit of his goals that he could cut away bits of himself to make room for them. 

Ronan eyed him as he got out of the car. Adam was built slim and fair in places, tanned and toned by work in others. It shouldn't have worked. But in Ronan's dreams it did work. And at present they were out of Ronan's dreams and it was still working, every part working all the way down to Adam's thin, still hands and his thin, still mouth. Adam's car was a shitty amalgamation of pieces that didn't go well together. Ronan found it offensive. But Adam himself was a collection of unusual parts that miraculously fit to make a far better whole. Adam should have a nicer car. Adam would never accept it. Adam trusted dirt and results, not kindness and gifts. 

"Oh brother," Noah said. He began to hum some song from the early 2000s that was probably meant to offend Ronan. So Ronan tripped him, wondering if Noah was solid enough today to fall. Noah was and did. Satisfied, Ronan strolled across Monmouth's front lot to meet Adam. 

"Gansey's not here," he told Adam by way of introduction.

Adam blinked at him carefully. He was carrying a ratty shoebox and he shifted it against the front of his oil-stained coveralls. "I know," he said. "I'm not planning to see him until tomorrow. He wanted to go to Fox Way."

This did not seem to trouble him in any way. Ronan, who knew a certain secret, wondered if Adam would be troubled if he had that secret too. If he could pop open the trunk of his shitty car and find the obvious truth about Gansey and Blue just sitting there. But this was not Ronan's obvious truth to betray. Adam might have figured it out anyway, but he seemed incapable of fitting it into his mind. Ronan wondered if he thought that Blue was so like him, so Henrietta-bred, and Gansey so like Gansey, that he'd ruthlessly cut away the very possibility. 

Behind Ronan, Noah made a noise of uncharacteristic distaste, like a vomiting dove. 

"I didn't come to see Gansey," Adam told Ronan after a minute. His voice was another unusual but welcome piece of him: cautious, surprisingly deep, tinged with everything he tried to hide. It was Saturday, which meant he'd already worked five hours fixing other people's cars. His blue eyes looked stark and alien. He was tired. His accent came through.

"I came to see you, not Gansey," Adam continued. 

Something savage and very free took flight in Ronan. If Noah made a noise in response, Ronan didn't hear it. The sound of flapping wings drowned every sense, joyous, powerful. Chainsaw, until now very unobtrusive on Ronan's shoulder or pecking at the lot under Ronan's feet, had seemed to feel what he felt, given a good cry, and launched herself at the sky, wheeling crazily. 

Ronan himself strayed very still. He was unaffected. Chainsaw was an excited child. Adam squinted up at the bird, uneasy. 

"I always think she might fly too far, but she never does. You should see how far she can go without you, how long," Adam said. 

Ronan's turn to blink. His blink was affronted. Some cautious and fearful part of Adam couldn't imagine a link like the one Ronan had with Chainsaw. Comments like these betrayed a core misunderstanding, an inability to know the dream rules.

"She's never going to be without me," Ronan said. 

Adam made a kind of countrified hmmm, a sound that was pleasant on the surface but soaked in six different kinds of judgment. He was too tired to fully realize he was doing it. If he had realized, he wouldn't have done it. It was a very Henrietta sound. It was a sound like he disapproved of Ronan's bird-rearing methods, and would be disparaging them later with someone over a chain link fence. This was the dragged-down part of Adam coming through, with no power in it to make it bearable. 

Ronan hated it, this small Henrietta judgment, and almost couldn't believe he was being subjected to it. 

"I'm sorry. I speak a lot of languages, but trailer park's not one of them." 

Adam gave him a look. It was a tired look and an effective one. 

_I already know we're not the same,_ the look said. The look said this slowly and evenly, like it was speaking to an idiot. 

Henrietta Adam faded. Adam became at once two steps closer to the sullen, disdainful Adam of Ronan's dreams. Ronan realized that this was not an improvement, and Noah, having caught up to them by now, merely sighed in answer. 

Ronan felt like tripping him again, or not really, but tripping someone, or possibly taking off in the BMW and breaking six traffic laws in six minutes. 

Adam brushed past him and headed into Monmouth. After a moment, Ronan and Noah followed. Adam stopped only before the door of Ronan's room, as though asking permission to enter. Ronan stared at him. Adam generally didn't seem to want to go into Ronan's room. He always gave Ronan the impression that there was nothing he needed there. 

Now he stood there, a dream set against a backdrop of traffic tickets, and said, "Well?" in an impatient way. 

Right. Adam was here to see Ronan, not Gansey. Ronan's anger left him with surprising quiet. He pushed ahead to open the door. 

"My palace," he said, gesturing at the mess within. It was a mess with less personality than it ought to have, less aggressive truth and more plain aggressiveness. He and Noah had just gone through and ransacked the whole room, burned the contents. Ronan was still on display here, but not all of Ronan. A part of him wondered what Adam would think if he could see all of Ronan in the room. The Barns had all of Ronan. The Barns was truer and better than Monmouth, and Adam seemed happy enough with the Barns. 

But now Adam's thin mouth just became thinner. Ronan realized too late that his room might be no Barns, but it was still better than Adam's room at St. Agnes. 

He didn't know how to defend himself, and didn't care to. He hadn't said anything wrong. The problem was not him, because Adam should know him well enough by now to expect things like this. The occasional accepted cruelty. Dream rules. But Adam didn't operate by dream rules; that was the problem. He was a product of a life with no room in it for dreams.

No longer worshipful, now mainly annoyed, Ronan said, "Well, fucking come in then."

Adam let Noah trail in first. Noah trailed until suddenly he seemed too present for the moment, far too present for someone dead, and took up most of the bed. This allowed Adam to take the desk chair and steer clear of the bed entirely. Ronan threw himself on what remained of the bed and ignored them both, frustrated, many different parts of him agonized, many more confused. Adam ignored his ignoring.

Ronan heard the rustling of cardboard and paper, like Adam was opening his old shoebox. He felt the slight incline of the mattress as Adam set it on the bed. 

Noah laughed, high and surprised. Ronan shot up and examined the shoebox. It was a child-size shoebox, scavenged from somewhere, with strange air holes puncturing the sides like maybe it had once held a small live turtle. Adam might have used anything else, except that possibly anything else wouldn't have looked so dramatically and penitently cheap. Adam's actual transformer was nestled inside. Noah couldn't stop laughing at it.

Adam looked slightly mortified. He thought the joke was on him. It wasn't. The real joke was far more mortifying than whatever poverty and shame version Adam was cooking up. Ronan suddenly didn't want him to know what the real joke was.

"Why yes, Parrish, I can dream you the whole set," Ronan said. 

Noah laughed harder. Ronan shoved him off the bed, knowing he wouldn't be hurt. Noah made a mewling sound for dramatic effect when he hit the floor.

"I don't want that," Adam clarified. His voice was practiced, even, and more powerful than it had been in Monmouth's front lot. It gave Ronan a dirty thrill. Every panicking part of Ronan reared up stronger than before. 

"I want you to make it live," Adam said.

Ronan stared at him. Noah's head came up, level with the bed, and he stared at Ronan.

"I'm not fucking on-demand cable. You can't just--"

"Can you give me a living one instead of this one?" Adam said. He was looking at a spot on the wall just beyond Ronan's head. It was a hiding look, designed not to meet Ronan's eyes. It didn't fit Adam; it was a cheap thing for Adam to wear on his face, and Adam settled for cheap things because he had to. Ronan felt keenly that there must be some goal at work, something great and perhaps ruthless in play. Not dream Adam, then. Not Henrietta Adam. An Adam very close to magician was asking him this.

Ronan thought of watching himself die in St. Agnes. Of Adam watching him. Of Adam seeing some secret part of him, knowing almost too much about the dream rules.

"It doesn't have to really be alive," Adam said, after a minute. He still wasn't looking at Ronan. The line of his neck was tense. "That's not the important part. I don't want to leave you with--with something that'll be gone after you are. I want something instead of this one, that's obviously different, so that I can tell it's not this one."

From the floor, Noah started clucking, as though to tell Ronan something.

"I can dream you a live transformer," Ronan said. "I just didn't think you were two fucking years old, that was all. My mistake."

Adam only held out his shoebox in answer. Ronan took out the transformer. He passed his hands over the toy, memorizing the feel of it. He knew he could get it right without doing this, but he liked touch. He always insisted on touch, memorization, whenever he experimented all through those late night visits to St. Agnes. Adam had agreed to those nights. A partnership. Casual. Casual nights of Adam looking exhausted and perfect and demanding, cocooned in thin blankets on his thin mattress while Ronan tried to practice on his cheap laminate floor. Eventually it would grow too late and he would have to stop. He always wanted Adam to ask him to keep going. Adam never did. Ronan had already dreamed him several new sweaters. Adam calmly folded them before he left for work in the morning and left them by Ronan's head. If Ronan didn't take them away, he'd find them in the same spot the next day, untouched. 

Adam hadn't asked for them.

But here Adam was: asking Ronan to dream. Ronan wouldn't have to burn the evidence afterwards, or take it home with him in the morning because Adam didn't really want it, or tuck it away where Adam would only find it by surprise. This was an unheard-of chance. 

"Okay," he told Adam. "I'll get you another transformer. You want a bratz doll too?"

"I want one like this one, but obviously a dream thing, so that I can tell," Adam said, very clear, like he was reading a homework assignment aloud. He still seemed uncomfortable with what he was asking. But Ronan could still give him what he wanted. 

Noah clucked, reinforcing this.

"And, "Adam finished, "I want this one gone." He emphasized the _gone_ when he said it. He emphasized it so much that it didn't sound remotely like Henrietta; it came out so crisp and practiced that for a moment he seemed to have lifted his voice from Gansey.

Ronan stared at him.

Noah stopped clucking.

"So throw it out," Ronan told Adam slowly. "You're an adult, Parrish. It's about time--"

"No," Adam clarified. "I want you to make it gone. Put it in a dream. We've practiced you taking things out. It's so easy for you now that you can do it by accident--"

"I could _always_ do it by accident--" Ronan said, frustrated. Things were slipping out of his control. They had been slipping out before too, because this was Adam, but now they seemed to slip worse. He thought of the feel of his own blood, the ruin of his body in the pew. 

What he could do: create. 

But to take something away? Put it in a dream? What about after the dream, when the dream went away? Wasn't it destruction, to slip something into a place so fleeting?

Dream rules were by definition twisted things. And all this time Ronan had assumed Adam hadn't known.

"You can only take things out. You can't put things in," Adam said, now talking over Ronan in that deliberate, even way. "Not by dreaming them in, anyway. But why does it work one way? It shouldn't--"

"It should," Ronan insisted.

It should.

"Are you sure?" Adam asked.

He wasn't. He thought of Prokopenko, comatose in some hospital in Arlington, and how no one had found a body. Where had the body gone? Had Kavinsky relegated the evidence to an incinerator? That was not Kavinsky. Kavinsky had been all about the unpredictable solutions.

Put the body in a dream. When the dream is over, what happens to it? 

Ronan was drawn to dangerous people. Adam Parrish was a more quiet dangerous than he'd ever encountered before. He sat tense in Ronan's desk chair and suddenly he was every Adam at once: magician, sullen dream, judgmental trailer park boy. Adam didn't like it when people didn't know the answer to something and didn't try to find out. Ronan knew this about him. It was part of why Adam stuck so hard by Gansey -- the face Gansey showed Adam was intrepid, fearless, knowledge-seeking. What Adam wanted to be.

Adam was still staring evenly at the wall. He was looking, Ronan realized faintly, at the same spot where Ronan had hung his father's mask. Only after trying to burn, stab, and crush the mask, Ronan had finally wrapped it in a pair of designer jeans and shoved it under his bed. 

_Is this the moment?_ Ronan thought, full of dread. Was that Adam, the one with his face gone, the monstrous Adam that Ronan had created, was this the Adam in front of him now? Maybe it hadn't been the mask at all that did it. Maybe something about Ronan made Adam dangerous. The mask had been a cage. What if it was Ronan that was the cage, an inexplicable half-dream that Adam couldn't stand, that Adam knew was destruction, but that he felt bound to nonetheless?

"Why'd you ask for a dream one then?" Ronan forced out. "Too poor to stand losing one of your few possessions, Parrish? Or was it so you could have proof that I really got rid of the first one, and wasn't trying to pass it off as a dream replacement?"

Adam flushed. Got it in one. That was easy enough to guess. Easy and infuriating. Adam was by nature suspicious. But that was no excuse. Ronan had never given him any reason to mistrust him. Ronan had never given him any reason to _know_.

"Get out of my fucking room," Ronan said flatly. 

"You don't even want to _try_ \--" Adam began.

"Why would I want to? Why would I want to do that?"

"To grow, maybe!" Adam said. "To expand your powers a little. Jesus, Ronan. Maybe even to mature. Some people want to learn, and change, and improve, and do something more with what they're given--"

"Yeah, well, you started at rock bottom, so I can see why that would be important to you, but I had money and people who actually loved me growing up," Ronan said.

Adam changed. 

It only took a moment. Then there was something out of control about his eyes, like Ronan had pushed out whoever Adam Parrish really was and left chaos in his place. 

"Maybe you can't change," Adam said. Now his voice was ugly and it was like he'd taken it from Robert Parrish.

"Fuck you," said Ronan. 

"I'm serious, Ronan. Maybe you can't grow. You're what -- half dream? Maybe you're like Matthew and your mother. Maybe there's only so much you can offer somebody, because part of you was shaped by a dreamer, and it's not real, or thinking, or human. It's just a dream. So it can't grow. so why bother trying."

Adam with his skin off, dripping with derision. Ronan was as capsized by it as he'd been in the dream. Now it was worse.

"You haven't really grown in all the time I've met you," Adam said, standing up. "Maybe you just can't."

He turned to go. Noah, forgotten on the floor, made a kind of scrabbling movement and grabbed at Adam's heel, missed, then lifted himself up and grabbed at Adam's sleeve. Adam shrugged him off with more force than Adam had ever seemed capable of, more force than was necessary.

"You know this isn't all of him," Noah told Adam. "This isn't-- he made you _sandwiches_."

"I don't want his sandwiches," Adam said, which was what they'd known Adam would say, but like this it was worse. 

Then he left.

Noah stayed only as long as it took for Ronan to dig out the mask, fury tinging his vision, and to lay into it even as it failed to break, staining his knuckles red, terrified of what it stood for and what that had done. When he was tired of that he tore out of his room and found Chainsaw locked out Monmouth, staring at him reproachfully. She tried to follow him to the BMW.

"You stay," Ronan ordered her, not wanting her anywhere near him in this state. He started the car. He thought, wildly, of Kavinsky. He thought:

_Maybe there's only so much you can offer somebody._

_Maybe you can't grow._

He kept thinking those two things. He carefully didn't stop think about Adam putting his thumb on the hidden part of Ronan, the part he wasn't supposed to see. Mutilated bodies in a pew. The things you shoved inside dreams until they vanished.

-

While Ronan tore through Henrietta, Blue Sargent tore through her closet.

It wasn't that she wanted anything from her closet. She was pretending. It was a stupid conceit and she knew it, but she couldn't turn around and leave the closet. Her room wasn't very big, so if she turned around and backed out of the closet she would see all of it. She would see that Gansey was stretched out on her bed.

Gansey was on her _bed_. 

He was off for the weekend, and for Monday and Tuesday too. Aglionby was having some sort of alumni event that required a great deal of bunting and hors d'oevres, but the students themselves were perfectly optional. So he'd come to 300 Fox Way. He wore a lime green shirt and a belt that had sailboats on it. The belt alone had probably cost two hundred dollars. Its parade of small pink sailboats held up his pants very well, which Blue supposed she should be grateful for, but she couldn't be grateful for that because he was, in fact, on her bed, and even in lime green he was easily the best-looking thing that had ever been on her bed. She was irritated with him. She was delighted. She didn't know what she was, and that promptly made her more irritated. 

"Do you need help looking for your--" Gansey began, then stopped when he realized Blue hadn't actually told him what she was looking for.

Blue said the first thing that came into her head, which also happened to be what she was looking at. "Galoshes."

"Oh," Gansey said. "Well, they're right there. I can see them from here. Unless you have another pair?"

She did not have another pair. Who owned multiple pairs of galoshes? Gansey, probably.

Blue took a deep breath, closed her eyes, turned around, and said, "Yes. Now I've found them. Thank you."

"It's not raining," Gansey noted.

"I just needed to know they would be there," Blue said. "In case."

"Do they have a habit of walking away on their own?" Gansey asked, sounding very interested.

"Only if Orla wants them."

"Ah." 

This seemed to satisfy Gansey, so he stretched out even more. This was part of the problem. It wasn't simply the bed; it was also all the stretching, and what that did to the space below Gansey's collarbone, visible despite all that lime green, and to the muscles of his upper arms. And, even more than that, it was everything -- it was the horrible shrieking from Gwenllian upstairs and the odd muffled sounds from Artemus down the hall and the low, unhappy tones of her mother and Mr. Gray this morning, and the ominous things Calla and Jimi always seemed to be two minutes away from saying, and in fact everything. 300 Fox Way was more crowded and magical than ever before, full of newer and more dangerous personalities, and Blue found that she didn't like it, and that in particular she hated how her father, her real father, was the one Gansey had come to see.

But Artemus hadn't wanted to come downstairs at that moment, and Artemus was a creature of will, Calla said. He didn't do what he didn't want to do. And Gansey was underfoot downstairs, where Mr. Gray didn't want him and Maura didn't want him and Jimi didn't want him and Calla definitely didn't want him, but maybe if Blue took him up to her room Artemus would wander by at some point, and then Gansey could surprise him.

Artemus had a habit of wandering past the door to Blue's room. Gwenllian had composed a furious, disgusting, and dirty lyric about it that had Maura threatening to run her over with the car. Maura seemed to feel that the song would be particularly damaging to Blue, but it really wasn't, because Artemus wasn't coming by to do anything dirty or disgusting, and actually if he had been Blue could have just stabbed him.

Blue wanted very much to stab him.

"Your curse," he'd told her, by way of introduction. He had been wrapped in a blanket in the kitchen, away from his underground prison for the first time in decades.

"Excuse me?" Blue had said.

"Your curse," Artemus had said. "When you kiss him, he'll die." Then, interested. "How is that coming along?"

Artemus had the same eyes that Blue did. Blue saw them in the mirror every day and should have been used to them, but she found that on Artemus they unsettled her. They were fanciful and sensible all at once. They scrutinized her while Artemus calmly picked at something as awful as Blue's curse and regarded it like it was a help wanted ad in a window.

"Do you want to help me get rid of the curse?" Blue had hazarded.

"Why would I do that?" Artemus had said. "I set it, didn't I?"

"What?" Blue had said.

" _What_?" Maura had said.

Maura had banished Blue from the kitchen and made Mr. Gray watch her to ensure that she couldn't listen in. There'd been furious screaming for the first three hours following Artemus' arrival. Then it quieted for two more hours. Then Artemus was offered Persephone's room and the chance to stay for an indefinite period. No one questioned this decision, not even Mr. Gray, who Blue privately felt should have been on her side, and who wasn't, because he liked the old-timeyness of Artemus. Blue saw this as a traitorous act. Mr. Gray should have been as upset as Blue was that Blue now had a father in the house. Blue didn't want this father. She wanted him only to hang him upside down and interrogate him. The process would involve Mr. Gray standing around as extra muscle while she waved her the switchblade and gave the impression of being very definite and powerful. 

Even Blue had to recognize that this was a dream that was likely to go unfulfilled. She was neither definite nor powerful. Mr. Gray seemed secure in the fact that he'd won Maura from Butternut, and unlikely to aid in interrogation. And Artemus wasn't a talker. He mostly liked to drift past Blue at odd times and look at her very frankly, like he was on the verge of saying something, only to change his mind and drift back the other way.

"So he's the one that cursed you," Gansey said now.

Gansey could have been very superior about the whole thing. Gansey was good at being superior. And about two months ago, very late at night, he'd phoned Blue to say, "Jane, did you ever think about where your kiss problem comes from? I mean the person who cursed you with it. Someone must have. Things like this don't come out of thin air."

And Blue had used some very choice words to inform him that her curse was none of his business, and something he was to learn about only when she was good and ready to tell him. It didn't belong in his book. It didn't belong in his boxes. This was not more Glendower-related magic for him to collect. This was hers, and it was hers to deal with.

And she didn't like linking him with the curse in her mind, not that he knew that. Not that it wasn't, in some ways, his curse too.

Not that he knew that. 

Though the curse apparently really was Glendower-related, because Artemus was Glendower-related, and the curse came from Artemus. Blue watched Gansey and his regal collarbone and his silly belt and his glorious muscles putting all this together. On her bed. She watched him open his mouth, close it, as though edging around the words he would say next. Anyone else would have looked nervous about it. Gansey merely looked pensive. 

She watched with dread as he tried to link her to Glendower, to his quest. Tried to fold her into his book and his boxes. 

And then, abruptly, he stopped.

"Well," he said, sitting up, "I'm not going to ask him about that, in any case. Scout's honor."

Blue stared at him, surprised.

He looked back at her a little fearlessly. He said, by way of explanation, "Jane, you already told me it was none of my business."

Blue felt herself adoring him, and hated it. Suddenly, she wanted him out of 300 Fox Way. She wanted him out of where Artemus was, and out of where the curse was. And she wanted him with her, but _she_ was where the curse was. But she still wanted him with her.

"Come on," she said, grabbing his hand and tugging him off the bed. She was smaller than him, so he mostly let himself be tugged. He looked pleased to be tugged. 

"I did want to speak to Artemus about finding Glendower," he reminded her, as she pulled him down the stairs and out onto the front step.

"It's a long weekend. You can do it tomorrow," she told him. 

"Tomorrow I'm busy. I told Adam we'd go t--" 

"Then Monday or Tuesday. He'll still be there. Trust me: Artemus doesn't go anywhere."

Gansey nodded easily, still apparently amused to find Blue tugging him to the Camaro. He cheerfully unlocked it for her. They settled in. Gansey seemed perfectly content to sit with her and talk. But Blue said, "Drive."

Gansey seemed perfectly content to do that too. Blue didn't tell him where to go and he didn't ask. He took the nickel and dime tour of Henrietta, past shabby antique shops and the crumbling library and Ninos and the bank and then back again and then a shortcut and then from the top, a contented loop the loop. He watched Henrietta as he did it, a king surveying his lands and finding nothing at fault. Blue watched him.

_How can I keep it from him?_

No. That wasn't the right question. That was stupid. She could keep it from him easily. She already did keep it from him. 

_How can I keep it from coming_ true _?_

That had always been her goal. She'd feigned disinterest and superiority towards the problem for a good long while, but underneath that she'd always been very firm: she had no intention of letting anyone's predictions come true. She hadn't known how she would prevent her true love's death. Only that she would. She'd never kiss anyone. Possibly she'd never really fall in love with anyone. It had seemed to her that if she had no true love, then she couldn't reasonably be expected to kill her true love. You couldn't kill something that didn't exist. 

Gansey radiated existence. He hummed something while he kept one hand on the steering wheel. The other crept across to her. He wanted. But he didn't touch. He just let his hand sit there naturally, dangling between them, proud and festooned with an overpriced watch, and any other boy would have been mortified and oversensitive because she didn't take the hand, but Gansey was neither. The offer was there. It was up to Blue to accept. The curse told Blue she would accept. That would have been enough to make Blue flatly refuse, only now a part of Blue was also telling Blue she would accept.

Gansey had said he wouldn't ask Artemus about the curse. Even though the curse might be related to Glendower. Gansey had chosen _Blue_ over his quest. 

And he'd done it so easily, simply, like it was second nature. When Gansey was unkind and oblivious, he was so obvious and powerful about it that Blue couldn't help but hate that side of him, and feel secure. But when he was kind he made it so easy and right that she began to feel, with dread, the full weight of the curse. The curse wasn't just the kissing and killing. It was the falling in love, too. Blue had assumed it wouldn't happen, that it wasn't happening, because how could she have a true love? She had four loves, all of them somewhat true, but a little false, too, the way raven boys always were. 

And while it had stayed that way, and while she stayed away from Gansey in the love sense, then there was no way she could doom him, or doom any of them by taking him from them.

"I realize that your kiss problem is none of my business," he said, after a while.

"Yes?" said Blue. She made herself sound dangerous, but she didn't feel dangerous: she felt relieved. If he backtracked, and tried to weasel out of his promise, then she would know he wasn't worth loving. 

Even before he replied, she knew he wouldn't backtrack.

"Jane, if a curse can be _set_ ," he said, "then surely a curse can be _un_ -set."

He was very confident about this; his tone and his old Virginia voice conveyed as much. This was questing Gansey, who knew there was magic out there somewhere and had no fear of it, only interested plans. 

"I said I wouldn't speak to Artemus and I won't," he added, somehow managing to convey that he was perfectly sure he could resolve the matter if he did speak to Artemus about it, because he was good at resolving things, because he was Gansey. "But someone should, and it should be you, Jane. We can't be defeated by a curse."

"We?" said Blue, before she even processed what that could mean. 

Gansey quickly said, "Oh," and then the hand between them vanished, worked its way up to rub at his lower lip. This left him looking unsure and unhappy, the boy inside of him, the Gansey that Blue trusted most because it seemed the truest. The Gansey closest to the one she'd seen walking the corpse road.

Blue had to tell him. She opened her mouth, and nothing came out.

She had wanted to ask Artemus _why_ , but Maura had pronounced that entirely unnecessary, because Artemus was a refugee from the fifteenth century and their whys didn't make sense to people now anyway, and certainly not to non-psychic people, and certainly not to non-psychic people who couldn't think clearly about the issue of curses because they themselves were cursed. But she hadn't had to ask Artemus why, because he'd told her.

"The boy is a mirror of one who is gone," he'd told Blue, leaning nonchalantly against the door to her room, but very pointedly not entering. "And you are a mirror yourself. And between two mirrors, one can trap an enemy, or work a great spell, or permit a great favor. But it works better with some sacrifice."

"You cursed me to make a spell of yours go _better_?" Blue had shrieked.

"I didn't say it was my spell," Artemus had clarified. "And there is no point in going noisy as a bittern. It is done. It cannot be undone, not even if I wanted it to be. And I do not want it to be."

And so Gansey was marked for death. A sacrifice. Not for any particular reason. Just to make a spell work better. Just to be the battery, the outlet at starbucks, the least special element in any magical working. Blue couldn't bear it. She had never wanted that for herself. She found that she wanted it even less for Gansey. 

"This isn't a we," she told Gansey now. "This can never be a we."

Something in Gansey's excellent jaw tightened. They were now on a wooded lane that ran parallel to the back of Blue's school. Gansey pulled the Camaro over next to the undergrowth for a moment and then, when all was still and the Pig went quiet, drummed his fingers on the dashboard.

"Can I ask why, Jane?" he said, his voice very even. "Is it because of the kissing? Because I don't have to kiss you."

Somehow the thought of Gansey someday not kissing her was as awful as the thought of Gansey someday kissing her. But it wasn't even the kissing. Technically, Blue could kiss anyone and they would be fine, as long as they weren't her true love. She could kiss anyone _but_ Gansey.

"We're not going to be able to be together without kissing," Blue said, and knew it to be true. Gansey was the pivot. It all hinged on Gansey. Their whole group hinged on Gansey, and she, too, was drawn into his orbit. The very Blue part of Blue despised this purely on philosophical grounds. But she found that it wasn't enough to make her despise Gansey himself. She was too far in, and it wouldn't be fair to despise Gansey now, not when Gansey's death pivoted on Blue, hinged on Blue.

A small part of Blue desperately wished there was someone else in the car with them. Ronan, demanding everyone's attention, demanding Gansey's controlling hand. Noah, looking hopefully at her from behind Gansey's shoulder. Adam in the back, quiet and unmistakable, drawing Gansey off in that way he had, the way he seemed to force Gansey to check in with him by sheer stubborn presence alone. 

But it was just Blue and her true love, who within a few months would be as dead as Jesse Dittley.

"This is not your problem," Blue lied. "This is my problem. Because this can't be a we."

She thought Gansey might look away, work his jaw again, remain otherwise unaffected and tanned and glorious. She thought he would bring President Cell Phone out to cover for his upset. 

He didn't. Instead he looked straight at her. There was something ancient and wild about him. Something was in his face now and Blue was furious to discover that it was a small vein of anger and pity. And _scorn_. 

This was not how Gansey was supposed to be.

"I thought you of all people would be braver than this," he said, cool power in every syllable. 

"Because you know so many cursed girls," Blue snapped, answering with her own vein of scorn. "Don't think for an instant that you know what it means to be brave for someone in my position--"

"Tell me it's not my position too," Gansey dared. His tone was still horribly not Gansey-like. He was right, and he knew he was right, and this made him seem self-righteous, wildly unapologetic. Blue didn't like this reversal.

"Drive me home," she said in response.

Gansey started the Pig up.

"You didn't answer me," he said.

"Drive me home," Blue insisted, feeling like she wanted to cry.

"Alright," said Gansey. "I guess that's my answer."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Most of the place names here are not mine! Which will be obvious when you get to them, I think.

In his tiny bathroom at St. Agnes that night, Adam scried for Persephone. He wouldn't find her. He tried anyway. He'd known her for a short time, but the loss of her crept up his spine like an ache. 

He couldn't sleep. His anger had gone somewhere during his afternoon shift at the factory. When he'd come home for the night he found shame waiting in its place. Shame from a dying Ronan in the pew, and a living Ronan down at Monmouth, and shame, oddly enough, from a yesterday evening at 300 Fox Way. 

During a brief lesson involving Persephone's deck -- now Adam's -- Mr. Gray had stepped into 300 Fox Way's sitting room for something. On the street just outside, a car had backfired with a loud crack. It must have had no catalytic converter to sound like that, like a gunshot.

Mr. Gray didn't think in terms of catalytic converters. He'd heard a gunshot. And Adam, looking at the dead way his gray eyes scanned the street outside the windows, and the ugly, blank look to his face, had felt very uncomfortable. It was an out of body experience. 

"That one has damage in him," Calla had said, once the Gray Man had realized there were no shots and retreated to the hallway or the kitchen or wherever it was he lurked. She'd said it as though explaining the peculiar behavior of an old cat who sprayed on the furniture.

Adam hadn't needed her to say it at all. Like called to like. He knew the Gray Man had damage, because he knew damage. He was like the Gray Man. The Gray Man who had beaten Ronan's father to death with a tire iron, while on the hunt for the Greywaren.

Others were on the hunt too. Adam knew, because he'd asked. 

"Many collectors want the Greywaren," Mr. Gray had noted. Calmly, carefully, he laid out a map of everyone he'd killed in pursuit of the Greywaren. He'd mostly killed men like him: men with decay in them. Men like Adam. Men like that worked for bigger men, he said. The Greenmantles of the world.

Adam couldn't ask Ronan to dream up a child murder for every one of those. Adam didn't _want_ to. But one night it had occurred to him that he might have to: Greenmantle might tip someone else off, as revenge. Someone might realize how curious it was that Greenmantle had gone down to a dusty, out of the way place like Henrietta, and returned empty-handed. Did these collectors know each other? Did they talk? Did they crowd around eachother, slapping shoulders and rivalizing even through their camaraderie, the adult version of the Aglionby crew team?

Adam couldn't quite imagine it, but neither could he imagine that Ronan would stay perfectly hidden in Henrietta for long. It had taken seventeen years for a collector to come close to finding Ronan. What if the next collector came sooner?

"The wakened line should put them off for some time," Mr. Gray had said. 

He hadn't said that the next one wouldn't come, though. He hadn't said how long it would take. 

The next one would be here sooner.

That was the nature of calamity. One calamity bred and prompted others; they proliferated, a clutch of ugly insects that needed only the first hatchling to awaken before they burst from the hive. Gansey and Ronan, princes of Virginia, would not understand this. They were insulated from the first insect pricks of the season, the red, painful, ugly swelling that heralded countless more. Their money was a net, a repellent, air-conditioned cars and countless cool rooms, assailants hitting cold air and sinking, dying, to the floor, swept away before they could do any harm.

But Adam had grown up in the hive. Sometimes he thought he was the hive. He'd presented Ronan with a fat, crawling, buzzing, stinging plan today, with countless creeping legs to it that he hadn't wanted to mention because each anchored it to Adam. The plan had burrowed out from his conversation with the Gray Man, taken shape at night, while Adam had tried to determine Ronan's best defense. Adam's answer to the problem was ugly, like Adam, and it emerged in an ugly way, thorax plump and oozing green fear.

Fear. That was what Adam offered. Gansey and Ronan didn't seem to have nearly as much as Adam did. But Adam could shape it into being and offer it straight from the source. 

He knew he could have just offered Ronan a gun. Ronan already knew how to fight, but against someone like Mr. Gray Adam doubted he would win. So. The gun. His father's. It was tucked away in the same box he'd once tucked the transformer. Adam had brushed his fingers against it when he'd reached for the toy and felt the hard finality the gun offered. This was a sure way to end any threat. If Ronan wasn't surprised first. If Ronan could do it. If Ronan wanted to continue his life of hiding bodies in the old church and the Barns -- and, to be fair, Ronan seemed the least affected of all of them by this lifestyle.

What a cheap lifestyle it would be. Adam couldn't link it to Ronan Lynch. Ronan always waiting, always a potential victim on the alert.

_That's not for him_ , he'd thought at his shabby room.

And out of the low-hanging ceiling he'd seen the shadow of leaves, and he'd smelled the green scent of Cabeswater, fully in agreement.

Adam was Cabeswater's partner, and Cabeswater his. He believed this now. He and Cabeswater were always shifting power between them, sharing it, colluding. The latest development was that he could not be hurt, not as much. Cabeswater had begun to protect him. Adam was still trying to wrap his head around this thought. His head would not wrap. 

Magician.

Was this what it meant, to have some power? The ability to keep anything at bay -- his father, falling roof tiles, collectors like Greenmantle. It seemed impossible to think that abilities like this belonged to Adam. Adam had never had magic before; boys like Adam didn't. Instead they had what was sometimes grudgingly termed promise, which was a polite way of saying nothing. Just struggle and will.

But these things were not power, not like how Gansey had it. Not like how Ronan had it. Ronan wasn't designed to work for Cabeswater, to resort to murder to keep calamity at bay. Ronan had power because he had power. He was a creator. Ronan resorted to ugly methods of defense only when Adam put the seed in his mind, guided his hand. 

_How can something like me keep him safe?_ he'd asked Cabeswater.

There had been a sound of leaves in his ears, the feel of mulch on the mattress beneath his bony fingers. Cabeswater was unsure, fearful. Strange, for somehting as old and great as Cabeswater. But the forest was susceptible to the oddest maladies, isolated by things like new highway construction, poisoned and weakened by would-be thieves. Cabeswater had power of its own, but it was nothing without Adam to do its will, to act and speak for it. So it came down to this fragile forest and to Adam, to his mind and the ragged, newly-protected shell of his body.

Poor tools. They were the only ones available, and Adam was good at making do with what was available. But still. Poor tools. 

So what was to be done? Cabeswater did its part for Ronan already: it sheltered Ronan's mother, a dream within a dream. But there were other dream places -- caverns full of damp lakes, stampeding herds, locked doors. These didn't shelter. They intimidated. They trapped. Artemus, Maura Sargent, Greenmantle's wife, assuming she was still alive down there. 

What if Ronan could do that? What if Ronan could simply get rid of those who'd try to hurt him? What if he could send them into a dream?

It was a cleaner, neater solution than shooting someone. Or dreaming up body parts. 

It hit him, scrying for Persephone, which was to say for no one, that he knew why he hadn't been able to tell Ronan all this. It was because the Ronan who'd sat in front of him, passing his old toy from hand to hand, was not the only Ronan Adam felt accountable to. There was that other Ronan. The dead one in the pew. The consequences of wielding power the way Adam did.

Adam thought of that Ronan often.

As though to remove that vision from his mind, he'd had been helping Ronan practice, helping Ronan theorize how best to remove Aurora Lynch and give her new life in the real world. But he was an interloper; he was not made to really understand Ronan's dreams. Adam could offer Ronan solutions, but they would always be tainted by Adam. They were not really clean, pure dream solutions. They were dirt and dust creations, like their maker. Effective, but not beautiful. There was no beauty in making a cage of Ronan's ability, until now used to free loyal birds, loose a perfect new Camaro, ornament the Barns.

Adam had gone to Monmouth to ask Ronan to taint that legacy. 

He resurfaced, lifted his head from the sink, felt the tin foil crackle beneath his fingertips. He had seen nothing, hadn't expected to see anything. All was strangely quiet since they'd rescued Maura and Artemus. A brief, dishonest calm. So Adam could reach out for the unknown and find only himself. But he was unknown. Every time he thought he'd finally seen himself truly, he turned out to be wrong. There were greater depths he could sink to.

He owed Ronan an apology. 

He put a shaking hand to his face as though to steady it, tracking the movement in the mirror out of the corner of his eyes. He no longer felt so haggard, not since they'd journeyed through the caves to rescue Blue's mother. But he still looked gaunt, grim. A distorted version of his parents.

He owed Ronan an apology.

After he straightened, stooped again to cross into the main room, stooped further and crawled onto the bed, he began to realize what he had actually said. The words had come out distantly, Robert Parrish rearing up through his veins. When would he learn not to let that loose? Could he shove that inside him and keep it there? Persephone played in his mind. He'd only known her for a small period, but he thought she might have been able to come up with a better solution. A path forward. That was what he needed, not a solution. There were no solutions to being Adam Parrish. He was not offered those. He had learned to survive instead, cobble together a path, reach into himself and shove aside his wriggling, many-legged, dirt-encrusted heritage, force out what he wanted in its place.

Ronan had very explicitly reminded him, as he always did, that his origins were beautiful, and that Adam's were not. Adam had reacted. But he had been in the wrong to do that. Ronan had not been saying anything untrue. 

Adam laid on his bed and listened for the green sounds of Cabeswater, watched for the shadow of leaves. It came. It still came, though he'd been cruel. He was comforted by this, and hated that he was comforted. Adam Parrish, now dependent on this bargain, this odd protection. He'd never really been as brave and self-reliant as he'd wanted to be. And now he wasn't sure he wanted to be. He wanted to apologize. He didn't know how to begin. If only Ronan would come now, knock the same way he always did, offer up his Aurora Lynch problem again, then Adam could offer his help in turn. And it would be like an apology. And Adam wanted that.

But Ronan did not knock. No one knocked, and then Adam fell asleep. Then it was morning and a brisk tapping woke him. He went to answer the door. 

It was not Ronan. It was Gansey.

-

Gansey had not spent the night envisioning apologies. Blue Sargent was meant to be more fearless than this. The greatest wrong in the situation was that she had been brought low, a marvel contained by her own curse. 

And he was not especially sorry to have pointed it out.

Gansey's people didn't dwell on apologies. When Helen and his mother fought, apologies were not even remotely on the menu. Charity dinners were, and brunch with friends, and political campaigns, and weddings, until three weeks later they were sending each other subtle gifts in anticipation of the fight being over: cut glass vases, portable telephone chargers, monogrammed bathroom towels that neither would ever bother to take out of the gift box. The proper course of action was to move on, not dwell, and to neither ask for nor offer forgiveness. Forgiveness came cheap. One could rise above in better ways.

Gansey did not normally try to act like a Gansey -- for one thing, he often thought ruefully, he didn't have to try. But after his fight with Blue, he reacted like a Gansey.

He would not send her towels, because she wouldn't want them. He would simply busy himself with other things, and whatever the painful problem was, whatever the fight had begun with, it would go away. It would wait for him to notice it, lose patience, and leave. He had enough wonder, enough to occupy his time. He had five new boxes of rare books on mythical beasts, on magical herds, on the symbolism of stampedes. The fight would have to handle itself. 

He let himself into Monmouth, noted that Noah was absent and Ronan was missing, took a shower, and settled in to read. It was effortless but methodical work, very absorbing, and he enjoyed it. He liked best the moments when two dissimilar pieces in two dissimilar books linked together. He was good at bringing them together, and good at finding what he wanted to find. When it all became too rewarding, he slipped on his glasses and retreated to his laptop and hunted for even rarer books. He closed Saturday by ordering four more boxes' worth. He almost didn't notice when Ronan slipped back in, smelling of liquor and cars, and when Gansey said hello he got a slammed door for his troubles.

Traffic tickets floated down in the wake of the noise. Gansey said, "Now really," and was on the verge of getting up to see what was wrong, but then something buzzed in his head again and he sat down and thought the best of it.

Helen and Mrs. Gansey did not dwell on problems, but Gansey could be an excellent dweller. He'd spent upwards of a year dwelling on problems with Ronan, problems with Adam, problems with Noah. He'd seen it for what it was: not _dwelling_. But solving. Pulling out the parts of himself he liked better than the typically Gansey parts, the part that was a brother to Ronan and wanted him at Aglionby, the part that admired Adam and wanted him out of Henrietta someday, because that was what Adam wanted. Rather than retreat into himself and his own needs, Gansey thought, he'd become very good at reaching out to keep the others anchored. He wanted it that way. It seemed more courageous than ignoring problems, the way his family did; or exploding with them, the way Ronan did; or stubbornly holding them close, the way Adam did. 

But this fight with Blue _buzzed_. 

He wouldn't hold it in his mind. He remembered a crawling sensation on every inch of his skin. He remembered weeks of banked fury because Adam had taken the Camaro. He remembered fear. 

He let it go. 

He let it go, and rose above. When his books couldn't keep him any longer he began to go over his old notes, then build his model, then back to books. It was a cyclical night and a long one, but he continued to enjoy it because he could, because he enjoyed this. He telephoned a contact in Australia. When asked how he was doing, he very truthfully said that he was fine. He carried the phone with him into the bathroom and rifled through the medicine cabinet, because it was already 2 AM and he had to meet Adam in the morning. He found a bottle of pills -- melatonin. Sleeping pills. He squinted at them, annoyed. They came highly recommended from the best physician in Northern Virginia. He hadn't taken any in four years. He'd always hated the heavy sensation the melatonin left on his brain. 

He took two. He overslept, and was late heading out, too groggy to even think of fixing whatever made the Camaro stall halfway to St. Agnes. He called for help and called Ronan and, when Ronan failed to answer his phone with typical Ronan-ness, called for a replacement to get him to St. Agnes the meantime. He was miffed when it came; somehow the company had missed the memo on his Suburban and had given him a Mercedes, which was even worse, and he wanted to blame his father because sending someone a car like this was something his father would do, some message or inside joke that only a Gansey would really get, at the expense of everyone else. 

The thing ran beautifully and gave Gansey a headache. 

He worried what Adam would think when he saw it. He worried about being late to meet Adam, who was probably awake and alert and ready, and who was never late without a good reason.

But Adam seemed surprised to see him.

"We said we'd get your suit done today," Gansey reminded him. "Remember?"

It was college interview season and Adam's old suit wouldn't fit. He'd been dreading that ever since he'd left his parents' house, a constant low-level worry that he would voice to Gansey at odd times. What if he grew too much? In the past few weeks, his fears had been confirmed. He was too tall, his shoulders just a little broader. Just enough. Did it look wrong? Did he need a new suit? Was there something he could do to this one, something that would be cheaper? Gansey had obligingly scrutinized him in the suit and confirmed his fears. Adam had looked miserable, the only boy at Aglionby to be terrified of his own growth spurts. 

Gansey wouldn't have thought he'd forget their plans to solve the problem.

But now Adam just passed a hand over his face and retreated into his apartment, leaving the door open. Gansey had received better invitations, but decided not to hold it against him. He strode in and ducked to avoid hitting his head on Adam's ceiling. Adam himself stooped forlornly near the bed in too-short pajama pants and a t-shirt and said, "Sorry. I guess I overslept. Give me a minute."

He vanished into his bathroom to change. The ceiling sloped at such an angle that the bathroom door didn't fully close. Gansey looked away to give him privacy, but not before he saw a long fair back with a few old scars striping a path down to Adam's briefs. Adam came from a life that couldn't ignore away its problems. Gansey abruptly felt ashamed. He buried his head in his hands while he waited, wishing his mind didn't feel so heavy with the melatonin, wondering briefly if he should feel more ashamed, having come to Adam Parrish's door like this, after a -- an event with Blue. An event that Adam surely didn't know about, and couldn't know about.

It was in this uncharacteristic pose that Adam found him. 

"Gansey?" he said. He sounded mystified. 

Gansey put his hands down and brought his head up. He couldn't fault Adam his confusion; bad posture, Dick Gansey II always said, could transform a man from a worthwhile friend into a total stranger. Gansey didn't like carrying his father's maxims around in his head, but there might be some truth to that one. 

"Ready?" he said.

Adam nodded, grabbing his suit bag from the door of his closet.

Gansey led the way downstairs, explaining carefully about the Mercedes and noting Adam's reaction. He was pleased to find no judgment. Adam could have fixed the Pig, had he been there; Adam was the height of cleverness with cars, their savior and companion, and Adam's judgment was an unpredictable thing. But he never judged Gansey for his grapplings with the Pig. If anything, he was a patient teacher when it came to cars, kind with Gansey's successes, forgiving of his mistakes.

Now he talked Gansey through the problem, waiting for each red light so that he could demonstrate, using a pen and monogrammed notepad he'd found in the glove compartment, just what seemed to have gone wrong. Adam seemed more awake now, and Gansey, as always, appreciated the care he took with his explanations, the deliberate, thoughtful way he went about diagramming. 

They were starting to do this again. They were better than they'd been in some time. The bargain with Cabeswater had given Adam something inexplicable, a powerful edge of unreality now coating the realest person Gansey had ever known. But their friendship, miraculously, had survived.

But Gansey had just hours ago been with Blue, acknowledged what he felt for Blue, as good as asked Blue whether she loved him. Blue. Whom Adam had first loved.

_I am a horrible friend_ , he realized.

And this, of course, brought the other, greater crime to the surface.

_I am a horrible...whatever I am to Blue._

Friend, surely. But something else too, to go by her response. And didn't that please him in some small way? Hadn't he squashed a million traitorous thoughts, back when it had looked like Adam might be the curse's target? 

Now he might be the target. Some part of him felt smug and glad and ashamed.

There was a wild, selfish Gansey family streak in him. He had so much compared to Adam and Blue that he felt sure he didn't need it, this streak. That wasn't who he wanted to be. It wasn't what they brought out of him, and this was, in part, why he loved them. But he'd still heedlessly deployed it against them, against Adam in those furtive, satisfied moments when Blue hadn't seemed to want him. Against Blue just yesterday. 

The Gansey they both hated, and with good reason. His knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. In response the Mercedes seemed to purr through the intersection. Next to him, Adam ran one light, appreciative finger over the glovebox latch. The movement contained all of Adam's restraint. In the mirror, Gansey could see that his eyes were dark with want.

It pained Gansey to look at him. Gansey looked more closely at the road instead. 

Something was wrong with the road.

They should have hit the main road by now. They would have. But somehow they hadn't. They passed a sign. It said:

SAINT'S PASS 30 miles  
SECONDBORN 75 miles  
ALTER 103 miles

"Where are we?" Gansey asked, not letting his voice betray how confused he was.

"I thought you knew," said Adam. His voice did betray confusion. He said 'knew' in the Henrietta way, adding some subtle extra sounds to it. He flinched to show that he'd heard himself. Gansey wished he wouldn't; there was nothing wrong with Adam's knew. And Adam had a point: Gansey had been out of Henrietta far more often than he had. Gansey ought to know where they were going. 

Gansey seemed to have become lost. It made no sense. If Gansey was behind the wheel of a car then Gansey was rarely lost. Not unless he wanted to be. He needed planes and helicopters to get well and truly lost, usually. And a sailboat, once. 

"I'm turning around," he told Adam.

Adam made a sound like he was acquiescing, but it didn't matter if he was. They could hardly stay lost. They had to start back the way they had come. 

The way they had come was apparently a very green road, too green for the time of year, with the blue mountains a stunning backdrop, young reddish brown birch trees with a wet smell crowding them in on either side, and here and there a balsam fir. It was all very picturesque. Gansey was sure he'd never seen it before in his life.

"I don't remember this road," Adam said.

"Me either," Gansey admitted. 

They passed a second sign. It said.

ALTER 100 miles  
FIRSTBORN 117 miles  
EV 346 miles

This was the only road; the sole road they'd been on since the turn-off at the Henrietta movie megaplex. It didn't seem to want to take them back to the megaplex. It seemed to want to wind through the mountains instead, to places that weren't their destination, which, Gansey thought, was very disagreeable of it. 

Disagreeable but wonderful. 

Thoughts of Blue, Adam, and the hereditary Gansey arrogance fled his mind. 

Gansey had spent so long looking for magic. Now magic seemed to have found him. The road in front was a vision. Mist had begun to dot the ground, and the trees had grown wilder, more gnarled, greener somehow. No longer trees he could recognize; these seemed as tragically personable as willows, but with thicker branches, redder bark, great crocusy flowers. It seemed the wrong season for flowers like that. It seemed the wrong universe for flowers like that. Gansey thought of Cabeswater. This was not Cabeswater, but perhaps it was on the ley line. Perhaps this was one of the dreams Adam worked so hard to link Cabeswater to.

Perhaps this was close to where Glendower was.

Something sang in the trees, a clear sound, midway between birdcall and bell. Just to test things, Gansey drove half a mile, noting the scenery, turned around, drove another half-mile, and noted how the scenery had changed, and how, again, the road seemed to be avoiding anything even close to normalcy. 

Now the sign said:

HARPS VALLEY 35 miles  
SECONDBORN 70 miles  
ALTER 97 miles

He tried again. The road resisted going anywhere new. In fact, it seemed to be going in the same general direction.

SECONDBORN 68 miles  
ALTER 95 miles  
FIRSTBORN 112 miles

Again, he tried. Again, Charlottesville was not forthcoming. Now the sign said.

SECONDBORN 67 miles  
FIRSTBORN 111 miles  
ROOTABAGA COUNTRY 254 miles

Turning around only made the road more determined. 

HARPS VALLEY 30 miles  
ROOTABAGA COUNTRY 252 miles  
ALICE'S FALL 679 miles

So they were not following the road. The road was leading them.

Alight with wonder, he tore his eyes from the road for a moment to glance at Adam, to see if Adam noticed it too.

One of Adam's hands was gripping the armrest so tightly that the fingertips were bone-white. There was line on his brow. His eyes were distant. He was mouthing something, so quiet Gansey couldn't make him out. After a moment, he realized that he couldn't make it out because Adam kept switching between English and Latin.

Aut ubi sum. Quae mentem insania mutat--

Without stopping this litany, he shoved his white-fingered hand into his pocket and produced a deck of cards. Gansey watched him shuffle them in the mirror. He wasn't so practiced as Blue was, but the cards somehow looked more natural in his hands. He seemed very powerful with them, an Adam that Gansey didn't fully recognize. Gansey went back to focusing on the road.

"Are you--" he began.

"Cabeswater," was all Adam said, voice clipped with strain.

"What's wrong with it? Is it gone again?"

What if this magical place had shorted out the other? Gansey swallowed hard. Cabeswater was too important to lose. It was Ronan's. Adam partnered with it; belonged to it, really. And Aurora Lynch was there.

"It's not gone," Adam said, after a moment. "It's--it's muffled."

"Muffled?"

"Like I'm connected to it long-distance. Like there's static blocking it out."

"I don't understand," Gansey said.

Adam made a very Henrietta sound, almost a Blue sound, a sound that sounded like, _well, that's all you're gonna get_. Then he went back to his litany. Gansey let him get to it and continued watching the road. There was now the sound of rushing water nearby. He couldn't see a stream or river. The car wound along the mountainside. Below, there was a great green valley with more crocus trees dotting it purple and blue in places. Gansey could see clear across to another mountain opposite, and he was sure that this second mountain hadn't been there a minute ago. 

Adam continued to chant. Gansey realized why he wanted to contact Cabeswater -- suspicious Adam didn't trust this road to take them anywhere good. 

Did Gansey?

He supposed it didn't matter. They were on it, and Gansey didn't like the thought of shirking any coming adventure that might lead them to Glendower. But no Glendower immediately appeared. The only thing to appear was halfway down the valley, when the road wound deeper into the crocus trees and left the mountain behind. It was a great painted sign tucked into the greenery. It said:

THIS WAY TO OTTOS AUTOS.

The sign was done in brown-reds and purple-blues and faded yellows and it had charm, but Gansey could hardly hide his disappointment. Or his intense desire to pay someone, anyone, to paint in the missing apostrophe. He nudged Adam, pointing. Adam opened his eyes and squinted at the sign. 

"Otto's autos," he said, and the way he said it was: autos autos. Gansey supposed there might not even be an Otto. The name might have been chosen for its alliterative qualities. 

Adam said, "Like a car dealership?"

Maybe Gansey could replace the Mercedes. It seemed criminal to not have the Camaro here; the Pig deserved to take this strange journey, and the Mercedesdid not. He didn't have to settle for the Mercedes. And neither he nor Adam had eaten breakfast. If Otto existed, then maybe Otto would have coffee. Gansey could bet it wouldn't be good coffee, but then metaphorical beggars couldn't be choosers. He followed the road to Otto's autos. It was the only road; he didn't have much choice. 

They came to a long, low house, red-brown against the green valley. Cluttered car parts overgrown with moss were scattered along the path leading to the door. A high clapboard fence extended on either side and continued along the back of the property. Gansey could see nothing around or over it. There was a gate big enough for the car to pass through, but it was chained shut. 

The road ended here. There was nowhere else to go. In the mirror, Adam's eyes were wide and mistrustful. 

Gansey put a steadying hand on his knee for a moment, then removed it to switch off the ignition. 

"Excelsior," Adam muttered at him, as they got out of the car. 

Gansey went in first, shouldering the door open because there seemed to be no knob or handle or even a key: it was just several planks of wood arranged into a door. Otto was not afraid of theft, whoever he was, if ever he was. It was dark and cool inside, and Gansey had to blink several times to adjust his vision. Every wall was paneled in dark brown wood. Cramped frames hung on them, with images of pink fish swimming in too-blue seas, fat pink sheep grazing in mint green meadows. A couch covered in red plastic was set against another wall; it crinkled when they passed it. At the far end of the room there was a phone booth with no phone inside, a door, and a battered, ancient coca cola drink machine, bright red to match the couch. 

Gansey appreciated the country-awful look of it for a minute. 

Then he noticed that there was also a low counter with a little man sleeping on it. He was yellowish white-haired, yellowish white-bearded, and round. He slept with his mouth open. Gansey could see that his teeth were white and perfect and young. But all the other pieces of him suggested extreme age. It was two and two making four if one of the twos was also a seventeen. 

Gansey cleared his throat very loudly.

The man kept sleeping. Gansey located the bell on the counter, squat and round like an old hotel bell, and dinged it twice. The man shot up comically and Adam, examining the drink machine, gave a small laugh. The little man was drawn by the sound. He stared over Gansey's shoulder at Adam. This was a little like being scrutinized by a fraying teddy bear, but Adam quickly converted his laugh into a hum in order to be more polite. He began to hum the murder squash song, then trailed off, apparently embarrassed.

The drink machine rumbled. Adam had apparently decided to have a soft drink for breakfast. Gansey couldn't blame him, but he'd hold out for coffee.

"Otto, I presume?" Gansey asked the man. "If there is one?"

"'Course there is one," said the man, blinking up at him with enormous blue eyes. "I'm him, aren't I?"

The name wasn't just a marketing gimmick then. 

"We've had something of a tortured morning," Gansey said. "We set out for Charlottesville, but seem to have driven into an apparition. The road took us here instead. Would you happen to know anything about that?"

"Well, I don't know about Charlottesville," said Otto, scratching his ear and ignoring Gansey's actual question. "You're in Saint's Pass is where you are."

Gansey looked again at Adam, who stopped examining his blue bottle of soft drink long enough to look back.

_Have you heard of Saint's Pass?_ asked Gansey's look.

_I have never heard of Saint's Pass,_ confirmed Adam's look.

"Something wanted us to come here," Gansey told the man, turning back to him. "The road doesn't seem to want to go anywhere else. Or, I guess it does, but it doesn't seem to want to go to Charlottesville, which is the only place we want to go."

"Well, Alter's not far off. You could go there," said Otto. 

"Alter?" Gansey said. Alter. Altar? Gansey tried to link it to Glendower. The war-god Mars will upon his altar sit... No. That was the wrong take on Glendower.

"Alter," said Otto, amiably unaware of why Gansey even cared.

Adam came up next to Gansey. He set fifty cents on the counter, holding his drink up as though to signal that this was payment. When Otto didn't protest, he turned to Gansey and offered another look.

_I have never heard of Alter_ , the look said. 

Gansey had expected as much. Otto picked up the coins, examined them like he wasn't sure they were real at first, then shoved them in a drawer behind the counter, nodding at Adam to show the payment had been sufficient. 

Adam spoke up next. "We can't get to Alter, or Charlottesville," he told Otto. "Like he said: we can't seem to make heads or tails of that road. When we try to turn around, it won't let us."

Gansey picked up where Adam stopped. "And the road only seems to lead here. So we need to find out where we are. We have things to do today, and we haven't eaten breakfast. Do you have a map? Or even just an explanation?" 

Otto dinged his bell absentmindedly and said, "Well, if you find a map, you can have it. If you find breakfast, I guess you can have that too. And you can do most anything you would need to do in Alter, only thing is to get to Alter you have to go through the back, and I'll say that's double the price in this case because there's two of you."

Gansey and Adam stared at him.

"Double the price of what?" Gansey said. 

"The price," Otto said impatiently. "The price. He's paid." This was with one fat, yellow-white finger pointed at Adam. "You haven't." The fat finger transferred to Gansey. 

"We have to buy your soft drinks so that you'll let us into your backyard?" Gansey asked, sure that he came off slightly derisive and not really caring. 

Otto stared at him guilelessly, not answering. Gansey felt frustrated. Generally, people did not react to him like this. He was not used to not being helped. He knew it was arrogant to not be used to this, but at the moment the Gansey in Gansey was making itself known. 

But Adam was good at quelling that Gansey. He touched his fingers softly to Gansey's sleeve and said, "Wait a minute," in a very low voice. Then, "Come on."

He drew Gansey to the coke machine. Trusting him, Gansey examined it. 

He realized what was wrong soon enough. It was a solid, square little machine, emblazoned with its cheery corporate logo, but there was nowhere to put the money. No coin slot, no bill sleeve, nowhere to swipe a credit card. A small sign was tacked to the front, blue crayon on dingy coffee-colored paper. A childish hand had scrawled: price is two coins non-negoshable. 

"It just gave me a drink," said Adam. "I thought I should pay afterwards, because-"

"Oh, no, it'll give you a drink for a song," Otto put in now, apparently listening.

Gansey cocked an eyebrow at him. Otto smiled a little vacantly. Gansey thought, well, fine, and hummed the first few bars of _Amazing Grace_ , selected purely because ten years of Episcopalian Easter celebrations made it one of the only songs he really knew off the top of his head. The machine rumbled. The front swung open. Inside, an icy white cavern, and on the middle shelf: a single drink. It was not coca cola. It was just a blue glass bottle like Adam's, with indistinct purple-blue liquid inside.

Gansey took it.

"Do I want to drink this?" he asked Otto.

"I couldn't make your decisions for you, son. I'm not equipped for that," Otto said. "It's Miwadi."

"Miwhat-y?" Adam said.

"No," was all Otto said in response.

Gansey looked at Adam. Adam looked at Gansey. Gansey said, "If I gave you twenty dollars instead of two coins, would you be more helpful?"

"No, son," Otto said, infuriatingly un-infuriated. "It's gotta be coins."

Gansey didn't even know if he had coins. Coins were for tip jars, or those leave-a-penny-take-a-penny bowls in gas stations, or else to clog the bottom of the washing machine when Ronan failed to remove them from the pockets of his jeans. But Adam was already rooting around in his old cargo pants. Carefully, testingly, he produced two pennies and set them on Otto's counter.

Otto held them up. Examined them. Put them away in his drawer and nodded.

"That'll do. Good of you to pay for your friend," he told Adam.

Adam flushed. Surrounded by tantalizing magical questions, it was still money that made him most uncomfortable. Gansey put a hand on his shoulder and kept it there. He thought the pennies had been a clever idea. But Adam avoided his eyes. 

"Come around the side. I'll open the gate," said Otto, and then he ambled out behind the counter and vanished through the back door without another word. 

Again, Adam and Gansey exchanged looks. They were good at this: wordless speech. Gansey had missed it. He hated being reminded that he was different from Adam, and when he and Adam spoke like this he never had to think of it, because they weren't so different when this happened. When they could read each other very easily, Adam's fragile face as communicative, precious, and open to him as the Camaro was. 

But now Adam's face was flickering with questions, distrust, a hint of panic. Adam wasn't just speaking to Gansey; he was still trying to call Cabeswater as well. One hand was still in his jacket pocket, rifling the tarot cards within.

"Is it still muffled?" Gansey asked.

Adam nodded, face tight.

"I don't think it will get any clearer," he told Gansey, "if we do this. It's this place."

Gansey didn't see how they couldn't do it, though. Something wanted them here. And a part of Gansey -- the part that came alive for Glendower, the part that buzzed with no fear, the only truly worthwhile part -- wanted to be here. He had Adam at his back to be mistrustful for the both of them. He trusted Adam with that. It was wonderful, a relief. Gansey himself could be given over to adventure.

Though he could see that this arrangement wasn't very fair or kind to Adam.

"I think it's--" he began.

"Connected to Glendower. I know," Adam said. His dusty eyelashes dipped. Accepting. They would do this. Gansey's heart sang with the doing, the wonder of finding this strange place, with its strange rules and strange fees, mythic, powerful. Pennies for the crossing into a new world. It had the ring of Glendower. It _must_ have the ring of Glendower. He told himself this as he brought the car through the open gate, past the fence.

Where it suddenly, improbably, broke down completely.

It was purring one minute. Then the purr flat-lined into a high whine, a sound Gansey had never heard any car make before, not even the Pig. Then, abruptly, the Mercedes gave up. It was over two hundred thousand dollars' worth of giving up.

Adam was out of the car in a flash. When Gansey caught up to him he was already ministering, muttering to himself, a doctor with a patient who'd been perfectly healthy five seconds ago. Gansey trusted him to find the problem and trusted him to explain it well, but he didn't ask Adam to explain. His attention was on Adam only for a moment. 

Then Otto's Autos took it.

Otto had autos. Autos by the hundreds, lined up in neat rows. But they were overgrown with green mossy tendrils, their wheels buried in patches of flowers, insects buzzing amiably in and out of their open windows. Strange, bifurcated trees began their growth by crawling in through one window, then emerging through another, bearing berries and plums. Some of the cars were a latticework of feathery leaves all along the hood, lilies poking out from behind the tires.

Hothouse cars. Ancient, abandoned, left to rot, Gansey thought.

Only after a moment he realized that this wasn't the case at all. He strode to the nearest car. He'd seen rusted, abandoned vehicles out near Adam's parents' trailer. They were cheap Honda Civics from the late eighties. They gaped hideously, stripped of their engines. The only flowers that grew from them were choked, weedy, and brown. 

This was a BMW. The kind that looked to come with a V12 engine -- the kind he associated with Ronan. A Ferrari crouched nearby, with great fat peony-looking flowers creeping up along the sides of its doors. Three Bugattis lined up not far away, sharing a mass of encroaching fruit vines with a Maserati and a Koenigsegg CC. 

In fact, there was not a single car here that would make Gansey's parents sigh at him with disapproval. Not if you removed all the conquering flora, anyway. Gansey picked a plum off of the BMW in wonderment. Otto appeared at his elbow.

"Well, there's your breakfast, I guess," he said agreeably. "You found it, so you can keep it. Like I just told your friend, you can keep anything you can pick. And you'll need to pick a new one. Your car's down. Had to go down. Won't even make it over the bridge now."

Gansey stared at him. Behind Otto, he saw Adam straighten up and turn, catch sight of the whole yard for the first time. Adam identified the cars for what they were right away. He approached a Bentley with his mouth hanging open. He began removing leaves from the hood. Clearly, Adam wanted to diagnose whatever had caused the car to be abandoned in Otto's yard.

Gansey felt as stunned by the luxury car garden as Adam looked. "Thank you for the plum," he began, trying to work up to a request for some information, "But--"

He broke off.

Adam was now crouching behind the open hood, tugging at something. Gansey wondered if he thought he could free the car from its vine prison. It seemed like the kind of magic Adam might perform. Maybe Adam could fix whatever was wrong with the Bentley, and Gansey could buy it from Otto, and they could be on their way. 

"Gansey!" Adam shouted wildly. 

Maybe the Bentley was stolen. Maybe they were all stolen -- how else would Otto have them? Gansey didn't particularly want to buy a stolen car, but he still found himself drawn to where Adam was. Adam had come around to the side of his chosen car, propped his bottle of Miwhatever in a patch of high grass, and was using his house keys to hack at something on the ground. The vines, Gansey realized. The ones cushioning the car's wheels.

"It's growing," Adam told him, sounding frantic. "Gansey, it's _growing_."

Well, of course it was growing. It was a vine. 

"Not the vines," Adam said, still hacking. "Or--yes the vines. But the vines are the cars. The cars are growing!"

He stopped hacking long enough to gesture at the Bentley, then at the Bentley's open hood. Gansey walked over to it and peered inside. The car had no engine. In place of an engine, out of its interior, the car seemed to be growing fat gala apples. Gansey stared. Otto appeared at his elbow again, grinning with his perfect teeth.

"This is not a car dealership," Gansey said, stunned.

"Heck no," Otto said cheerfully. "It's an orchard. I grow the best autos in Saint's Pass."

"Good of you," Gansey managed.

"I try," said Otto. 

"And we can keep what we can pick?"

"Sure you can," said Otto. "Whatever you find and pick, you can keep." He scratched his ear again. "I don't grow maps, though."

Gansey supposed he could forgive him. A few hundred automotive miracles were surely enough for any orchard-keeper. 

Otto continued. "You might wanna tell your friend to pick another one. This one's not ripe, and it'll be hard to get it out, and it won't reward you once it is out, since it's not ripe. Riper ones are closer to the bridge, this time of year."

"But do they _run_?" Gansey asked.

Otto looked affronted. Gansey revised the question. He supposed they could just test whatever car they picked, once they had actually picked it.

"You don't have anything in orange?" Gansey asked.

"Not the season for oranges, no," Otto said.

"Alright. Do you have anything we can use to do the picking?" Adam didn't seem to be making headway with house keys, and, thanks to his mother's commitment to keeping a safe home, half of Gansey's house keys were security fobs. 

Otto nodded amiably now. He said, "Sure do. You paid the fee, so I sure do. You and your friend go pick a car. I'll catch up with you." 

They returned to the Mercedes to get Adam's suit bag and Gansey's mysterious blue bottle of drink. The sun beat down on them as they hunted for the cars near the bridge and Gansey was half-tempted to drink his drink, but neither he nor Adam succumbed. They didn't actually know what it was. Knowing this place, it could make them small as ants to drink it, or tall as the mountains. Gansey wasn't sure if he should eat the plum, either.

Eventually they heard the sound of rushing water and found a line of shark-nosed BMWs just like Ronan's. These were covered in moss but otherwise mostly clear of any suffocating greenery. Adam immediately took to the ground, sliding himself under the nearest one and trying to determine where the roots were, and where they would need to cut to get the car free of the earth. Gansey looked down at him in admiration where he lay, not entirely sure he could be much help. Adam had known the cars to be wrong almost at once. Adam knew what should go in a car, and, linked to Cabeswater as he was, he could probably recognize what was almost certainly some kind of local ley line magic. Gansey was only beginning to learn about cars, and when it came to the magic it was Adam who'd taken the experiential seminar. Gansey had mostly researched and spent a lot of money on what could best be termed study-abroads. 

But when Otto returned, he was carrying a spade and a machete and Adam stared at the latter instrument like he didn't want it anywhere near him. So Gansey rolled up the sleeves of his lavender button down and took the machete in hand. He'd used one before, hacking at roots a lot like these in New Zealand one summer, trying to access a lost cavern that was said to have been built by Glendower's supposed descendants in the 1890s. He wasn't especially fazed by the implement. 

"Show me where to cut," he instructed Adam. 

Nodding, Adam crouched down and pointed out how the tires seemed to rise from gnarled black vines. He had already begun to dig them out halfway with his hands. Now he took the spade and dug to make room for Gansey, and Gansey hacked wherever he suggested.

After about twenty minutes, they were sweating, brutally thirsty, and in possession of a planted BMW.

"Keys?" Gansey asked. 

"Check those little nuts growing near the trunk," Otto suggested.

"Nuts--oh," Gansey said. Adam had already picked what nuts there were to be had and was holding them out. When cracked open, each produced a set of keys. He pocketed one. Adam pocketed another. Sharing a look, they reached for a spare, just in case.

"Thank you," Adam told Otto politely.

"'Course," Otto said. "Now, you'll wanna head that way. That's the bridge. Then Secondborn. Then the mountain. Then Alter. Can't miss Alter once you're through the mountain. And whatever you need to do, you can do it in Alter. You can do most anything in Alter: believe me."

"We certainly do. Thank you," Gansey said again, and opened the driver's side door. Adam slid in from the other side. The interior of the car smelled like new car, and it unnerved Gansey, because it _was_ a new car, but it was also a car he'd just leveled from the earth the way he might have chopped a tree. Gansey felt some trepidation when he put the key in the ignition. Would it work? Would the magic work? And would it work right? Or would it demand some bargain, flay off all their skin, bury them in some underground cavern for seventeen years?

The car worked. It came to life the same way Ronan's did, powerful, in command, and Gansey reached up to adjust the mirror so that he could catch Adam's eye in it.

Mistrustful though he was, Adam looked every bit as delighted as Gansey felt. 

They started for the bridge. Behind them, Otto waved a fat little arm, his small round form soon fading into the distance.

"I guess we're going to Alter," Adam said.

"I hear you can do most anything in Alter," Gansey said solemnly. 

Adam doubled up laughing, hiding the laugh in his long body, but still laughing. Gansey couldn't remember the last time they'd laughed together. On their way to D.C.? They were in a better place than that now. And there was magic. Magic had found them, as though it were paying back all those years Gansey had been trying to find it. And it was sure to be linked to Glendower, and Gansey would be fearless about finding the link, and if he could be fearless about this, and have Adam at his back while he did it, then--

Surely other things could work out the same way.

He smiled at Adam in the mirror. In the mirror, Adam smiled back.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some necessary table-setting this chapter. Also, I have many feelings about completely arbitrary and made up things like Noah's possible hometown, Declan Lynch's feelings about his mother, Blue Sargent's magnificent teen witch catastrophe fashion, Tad Carruthers finally accepting himself someday at age 33, and Henry Cheng's totally bullshitted-at-3 a.m. Religion & Ethics paper that he got an A- on in sophomore year and that he is still bitter about because even if he did bullshit it at 3 a.m., it was a kickass paper and it should have netted him an A.
> 
> None of these things actually made it into the chapter in a concrete way (though there are nods here and there). I just thought I would mention that I have feelings about them.

On Sunday, Artemus announced that he wanted to pray. 

"'Twas a dirty dirty clergyman!" Gwenllian shrieked from the stairwell. She did not want to eat at the table with Artemus. All of 300 Fox Way got to enjoy her perching on the banisters and shrieking.

Blue and Orla, who'd never willingly shared anything in their lives, shared a look of commiseration. They both appreciated how much it meant to do right by Gwenllian, but neither of them actually enjoyed living with Gwenllian.

"You want to what?" Jimi asked Artemus. 

"Took his filthy filthy prick in hand!" Gwenllian shrieked again.

"Pray," said Artemus.

"Orla, take Gwenllian upstairs," said Maura. 

Orla made a face and didn't move from the table.

"Pray?" said Jimi. "You pray? We all thought you were some kind of medieval hippie. I mean, it's fine. We get accused of being modern hippies. But what do you pray to?"

"Maybe he prays to trees," suggested Mr. Gray.

"I pray to what I pray to," said Artemus.

"Perfectly circular and uninformative. Truly you're going to fit in well in this house," said Calla. 

"Licked the crown, and made his--"

"Orla, _go_ ," Maura said.

Orla stood up and grabbed Gwenllian by the arm, dragging her up the stairs. Cackling, Gwenllian let herself be dragged. They vanished with loud, glorious movements, the way only two goddesses could.

"Perhaps I want to pray because I want five minutes of quiet away from this house," Artemus suggested.

"Tough shit," Calla said. "You're stuck here. The terms of our bargain. We give you succor and shelter. You stick around and do your utmost to keep your daughter from being harmed by her curse."

And then everyone stopped talking and looked at her.

"Calla," said Maura.

Calla put her spoon down. "Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't realize we were supposed to be hiding the ball on this one. It's hard to figure out when I'm supposed to be on your side and when I'm supposed to be on Blue's. Except when you get yourself trapped at the threshold to eternal evil, leaving me to watch a friend die and deal with a grieving kid and host your ex-con boyfriend--"

"I am not an ex-con," the Gray Man said politely. "I've never been convicted of anything in my life."

"-- then I think I'm definitely on Blue's."

Maura went a shade of red that was red with teeth. Calla smiled. Blue, who had never expected to find Maura and Calla fighting, much less fighting over _her_ , opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again and said, "Thanks."

"You go upstairs," Maura snapped.

"Why?" said Blue. 

The obvious answer was because Maura was her mother, but Maura couldn't say that because Maura hardly ever said that, and anyway in this case Calla could then say, "Some mother," or "A mother who skipped town to dig up Butternut," or "Blue, who was your mother for the last few weeks?" And no one wanted that. So Blue, Jimi, and the Gray Man watched to see what Maura would say instead. 

Artemus watched his Eggo waffle, which he seemed to find as disgusting as Blue found it.

Calla put down her spoonful of waffle and picked up her handbag. 

"Blue, Butternut, come on," she said. 

Blue rose, more to see what Calla was going to do than anything else. She didn't put her yogurt down, though. Artemus rose too, and he put down anything that might have touched waffle.

"Where are you going?" Maura demanded.

"I'm going to keep a lookout for Butternut while he prays to a tree, so that the eldritch spirits don't sneak up on him and knife him in the back for cursing his only daughter," said Calla. "And the daughter is coming with us, aren't you, Blue?"

Blue shrugged. Artemus made her rage, but Maura was the one who kept Artemus around, so Maura made her rage as well, if only indirectly. And Calla had always been the easiest to get information out of, and Calla was indicating that she wanted to let key information slip. So. 

"Let me get my coat," Blue said. 

Maura looked pained. Blue ignored it. She joined Artemus and Calla by Calla's Ford a few minutes later, still eating her yogurt. Calla was bullying Artemus into the backseat. This was an enjoyable sight. Artemus hated cars. It took up the rest of Blue's yogurt-eating time to get him inside. When she was done, she put the container in the recycling and climbed into the front next to Calla.

"I require a place on the ley line," Artemus said, once Calla had started up the car.

"Really?" said Blue, even though she generally avoided speaking to Artemus if she could help it.

"Of course," Calla said. To Artemus she said, "I have a place, don't worry." And then to Blue she said, "Did you think the pretty one was the only person obsessed with the ley line? Why were the two of you fighting, by the way?"

Blue made a face. She'd come because Calla was supposed to reveal something big to her. Not to end up revealing anything to Calla. Let alone revealing the fight with Gansey, which had played over in her mind all night and had left her alternately enraged and miserable. 

She didn't want to think about the fight with Gansey. She definitely didn't want to talk about it.

"Who is the pretty one?" Artemus asked.

"Shut up, or I'll take you to the dog park. You can pray to the trees while standing up to your knees in dog piss," said Calla. "Seriously, Blue. Now is not the time to break ranks and fight."

"You're one to talk!" Blue said. She was annoyed at the obvious hypocrisy.

"My ranks are already broken. My best friend died a few weeks ago," Calla said. "And I'm not at the heart of whatever's going on, but you are, because of those raven boys of yours."

"How do you figure that?" Blue demanded.

"The same way I can figure that you fought with Dick Gansey the Seventeenth. You leave your laundry basket in the hall, which means I get to touch your stuff. Lucky me."

"You rifle through my dirty laundry?" Blue shrieked.

"I trip on on your dirty laundry," Calla corrected, "and then I have to feel around for your socks in the dark to pick them up, and put them in the basket, and take the whole thing downstairs so that other people don't trip. Don't leave your dirty laundry in the hall."

"I thought you were going to tell me about the deal with Artemus," Blue said.

"I did. I told you everything I know. Butternut, confirm?"

"I made no deal with Calla," Artemus said. "Only with your mother. Calla has told you what she knows." He said this in a tone that indicated he certainly wouldn't be telling what he knew. Blue flipped her switchblade in the direction of his reflection in the rear view mirror. He seemed entirely unaffected by this. 

"Stop that. Listen to me," Calla said. 

Blue obediently put her switchblade down.

"It's going to be more important than ever that you and those raven boys sort yourselves out," Calla said. She pulled the car down a familiar green path bordered by rancid-smelling flowers. Up ahead Blue could see the line of the low stone wall, and the crumbling walls with no ceiling left to hold up.

Did they have to go _here_?

"Yes, yes we do have to go here," said Calla, though Blue hadn't said anything. "And you know perfectly well why we do. It's where all of this really started for you. How about you, Artemus?"

Artemus stared at them guilelessly from the backseat. Calla made a disgusted sound. She stopped the car.

As Blue climbed out, she had to admit that Calla was right. This was where it had started for Blue. It hadn't started, really started, with Artemus, because she'd only met Artemus this year. His curse hadn't seemed really real for a long time. It had been an accepted part of her reality, that was all, something vaguely sour that danced along the fringes of her daily life. The magical equivalent of wondering if she'd ever see a coral reef and suspecting she never would. Or knowing she had to work for the next five days with no break. Unpleasant. But there was nothing she could do about it. 

Blue was too sensible to get worked up about things like that. Until she had. And the start of it was meeting the raven boys, and even before that the start was right here: at the old church. Finding Gansey hunched, defeated. On the corpse road.

Blue left Artemus and Calla at the lych-gate and made her way into the ruin, where Noah was. Not Noah. The bones of Noah. Blue wondered if he would come when she called. But she didn't call. It seemed cruel to call Noah here. As far as she knew, he had no interest in being reminded of his bones. Still, she crouched down at the spot where he lay. Someone had left him something. Blue thought it must have been Adam, because when she dug it up it was a very familiar transformer. 

Strange, to think of Adam coming here alone to lay gifts for Noah. Blue remembered a small spray of flowers. This was like that. Personal. Not showy. But somehow important nonetheless. So if it hadn't been Adam, then it had been someone whose mind ran along similar grooves, and Adam had a kindred spirit out there somewhere. 

This hit Blue with an odd relief. Blue had long ago accepted that she couldn't be that for Adam. A moment like stadium lights switching on all at once. Feelings for Gansey. Therefore no feelings for Adam. It was the only answer that had made sense. Why had it seemed safer to love Adam? Adam had seemed safer, for a time, though now she couldn't remember why. 

He came to 300 Fox Way more often now, after Persephone's death. The house's residents, minus Blue, regarded him as an especially fragile legacy, which was strange because before they hadn't seemed to regard him at all. But Persephone's death had changed things: now Adam seemed touched by something that had slipped through their fingers.

Blue had always wanted to be treated that way: magical. Powerful. Psychic. Not merely there to enhance a reading, but respected and taught. Persephone's first, last, and only pupil. 

Blue was surprised to find that she was not jealous. Instead there was an odd kind of relief. She hadn't known how she might keep Adam in her life after choosing Gansey. But she still liked his strange and elegant face, his quiet, and lately how he seemed to be trying. Trying at what, even she couldn't say. But it was there, like something in him had been renewed. 

To lose him on top of the promise of losing Gansey would have been unbearable. Losing any of them would be. 

It felt wrong to consider this crouched by Noah's bones. Noah had been so unstable lately that an awful part of Blue wondered if it wasn't time. The dead walked the corpse road, and entered the church, and were gone. But Noah had not gone yet. Had Noah missed his appointed walk on St. Mark's Eve? Had he been intended to walk the corpse road here? He had not been born in Henrietta, true. But then had Gansey? It seemed unlikely. And Blue felt that Noah and Gansey had both earned honorary citizenship. One loved Henrietta so much it seemed to burst from him. The other had been trapped here for seven years. Or had Noah already made his own corpse walk back in his original hometown, wherever he was from?

"Short Hills, New Jersey," Noah whispered.

Blue nearly jumped out of her skin.

He was sitting on the dirt in front of her and he looked perfectly substantial. Normally it would be wonderful to think of a stable Noah. But since a moment ago he hadn't been there at all, now it was was not so wonderful as it could be. Blue cast a wary look over her shoulder at the entrance to the ruined church, where Artemus was, where Calla was. Artemus was out of sight. Calla had clearly been looking in after Blue, but now she turned away, very obviously looking somewhere else.

"Why did you even bring me here?" Blue called out.

"Reasons," Calla said.

"That's cryptic," Blue said. 

"Good. They're cryptic reasons," Calla said.

Sighing, Blue turned back to Noah. He was looking sadly at the transformer. 

"I think this is yours," she told him.

"I wish," Noah said. "I asked Ronan to dream me one. He didn't. That's why."

Blue got the sense she was only hearing half of the story. Noah nodded when she got that sense. She was only hearing half. But she doubted he'd come here to discuss a transformer. 

"Well, maybe we'll shove it in Ronan's face and tell him to dream you one," she told Noah, making Noah smile. Then she said, "What's up?"

"You fought with Gansey," Noah said promptly.

Exactly what Blue wanted to neither talk about nor think about.

"I didn't ask what was up with me, Noah," she said crossly. "I asked what was up with you."

"Nothing's up with me," Noah said. "I don't fight with anybody. You all fight. I have to deal with it, but I don't fight. I don't think I can. I don't think I was ever up for fighting, but now I'm really not."

"Ever? Not even when you were -- when you were back in Short Hills?"

Noah considered this.

"Maybe I fought in Short Hills," he admitted. "But I think I drank more than I fought. Maybe I fought too. Short Hills was really boring." Then he brightened, like he'd found a large sum of money crammed into a forgotten pocket. "But I had a girlfriend!"

"That's great," Blue said supportively.

"Nah," Noah said. "You wouldn't have liked her, so I don't think I should have liked her as much as I did. You wouldn't have liked me, either. Guess that means I'm better now in that way, at least."

Blue felt oddly flattered to be Noah's yardstick in this regard, but also oddly unsettled. Noah was good at producing that combination in people.

"You shouldn't fight with Gansey," Noah said solemnly.

"You tell her," Calla called out. This was possibly the first time she'd ever acknowledged Noah. Noah responded by ignoring her utterly. Blue had the strange sense that maybe he didn't really hear her. He looked substantial now, but maybe he was insubstantial in other ways, in ways that affected whether the living world was substantial for him. She'd never considered it before. Maybe Noah only had enough in him to be _on_ in some ways, and so being this present meant he was cutting off other parts of himself.

In front of her, Noah nodded once, very slowly and deliberately. He pressed the transformer into her hands. He said, "It won't be a problem for long. Remember what you said you'd do with this."

With that cryptic pronouncement, he vanished.

Blue, kneeling stiffly before his bones, reflected that she'd had her fill of the cryptic. The cryptic was not her friend. She couldn't see why she was always on the receiving end of it, for one thing. Why couldn't she ever be the one to dole out mysterious advice? Why was she always just a creature that amplified the relative crypticality of the people around her?

She was very irate when she stomped back to Calla, and even more irate when she saw Artemus standing with her, peering into the church like he'd been watching as well. He opened his mouth as though to say something, then closed it, like he'd thought the better of it. 

"I think we're all done here," Calla said brusquely. "What did he give you? Let me see it."

"Did you bring me here just to get something from Noah?" Blue snapped. "Like this is an adventure game, or--"

"Obviously, and don't get snippy with me. Do you think I like this? This isn't for me. This is for you," Calla said. She took Blue's hands firmly, but not cruelly, and touched a finger to the transformer. She said, "Alright. One more stop then."

"I don't like not knowing what's going on," Blue told her.

"Too bad. It's the human condition," Calla said. "I don't know why things happen either. I just know that they will happen, or that they have to happen. That's all I get."

This was a fair assessment of what being psychic was, but Blue found, as they walked back through the lynch-gate, that she wasn't satisfied with it. Maybe Calla didn't have all the answers, but she still had more than Blue got. Calla didn't have to be buffeted about, subject to the whims and power of other people. Blue told her this in detail as they climbed back into the Ford. 

"I know exactly one thing you don't know," Calla said, voice very even. "And that is that we're going to Aglionby right now, and I only know that because I touched your ghost friend's muddy toy. Do you think I _want_ to go to Aglionby, Blue? Do you think I would ever have any interest in setting foot at my workplace during my weekend off? Do you think I wanted to spend my Sunday getting you connected to your raven boys?"

"We are ever pawns of fate," Artemus commented.

Calla flipped him the bird in the rearview mirror.

-

Sunday was Ronan's weekly tennis lesson this year. 

Ronan didn't often miss a tennis lesson. He was very good at tennis. Easily the best in the school. Tad Carruthers and Henry Cheng, team co-captains, were marvelously offended by this. Ronan enjoyed walking past them on the court and hearing them comment, then responding with un-subtle gestures near the area of his crotch. 

His coach was a mother of three who lived out in an expensive subdivision and otherwise spent her time driving her children to and from their own tennis practices. She would exit her Suburban and walk up and say, "Honestly, you boys." She did not have experience with boys; her children were all girls and even her husband was, possibly, a girl. Ronan had never cared to ask. The cheerful way Coach Torres described their boring as shit life, bat mitvah plans and meetings with the PTA and coordinating tennis competitions, seemed like nothing any man Ronan had ever known could bear. Also she seemed to assume that all boys just naturally came Ronan-shaped, with all Ronan's habits. It was a beautifully fucked up assumption.

Her saving grace was that she was easily the most demanding tennis coach in all Virginia, with eight Grand Slam tournament singles titles under her belt. So Ronan resented only the fact that she'd changed his lesson to Sundays this year. It meant that the Lynch boys had to attend an earlier mass. And in the past, when the tennis lesson had sometimes occurred after school, Ronan had experienced the rare thrill of seeing Adam Parrish hunched over in the grass beyond the stands, ignoring the tennis players and the lacrosse players and the laughs of the water polo team as they walked to practice. Adam closed off in his own world, aloof and defiant, while Ronan operated similarly on the court just feet away. 

If he couldn't access Adam Parrish's world, then there was something to be said for how they each kept similar kingdoms. 

_See?_ this something seemed to say. _I could know you._

This Sunday, however, he was glad that Adam wasn't there. When he looked at the empty spot on the grass, something bitter and hot danced there instead. Maybe there's only so much you can offer. Only so much. Only so much. 

Topspin. Hitting on the rise. Serve and volley. 

"Aggressive today," Coach Torres noted. "Even more aggressive than usual."

She was a compact brown shark in a white skirt and black visor. No one was on the grass behind her. No deceptively fragile form to balance her out. Ronan wanted to destroy something.

"Lynch, I kind of like how your whole strategy is just to force easy floaters," Henry Cheng called out from the next court. Tad Carruthers hooted. 

"Hey, boys, stick to your own," said Coach Torres cheerfully. 

"The master leaves us stunned, that's all," Henry said, matching cheer with cheer.

"Please suck my dick," Ronan said.

"That's against your religion, and I respect you far too much," Cheng said. 

"And he has Parrish for that anyway," said Carruthers.

Topspin. It hit Tad's left eye. Coach Torres watched him shriek and grab his face, and then said, "Oh, sorry boys," like she was the one culpable, and like a crime against one boy was a crime against the whole formless mass of boys.

"I want to get your right eye next," Ronan called out calmly. Tad continued to shriek. Coach Torres made a time-out T with her hands and jogged over to check on him. Echoing her, Henry Cheng crossed over to meet Ronan. 

"You know, the sport really values _selective_ aggression," Cheng said. 

"I've selected," Ronan said. "My next target is your balls."

"Well, Tsonga, that doesn't do a whole lot to argue against Tad's point," Henry Cheng said. "But I'll grant that he crossed a line. Probably not the same line you think he crossed, but--"

"Don't tell me what I fucking think," Ronan instructed. Serve. It sailed to Adam's spot on the grass.

"Sorry, sorry," Cheng said, waving a hand. "I just. You know. Weirdly super Catholic, friend to our very own Reagan the Second. Gansey the Third? Caucasian names are so exotic. They trip me up. My point: it's clear where you stand on these things, and I respect that even if I don't agree. Listen, though. I was meaning to ask. What's up with your brother?"

Ronan stopped serving and stared at him.

"Why the fuck do you think I care?"

Declan sometimes came down to Henrietta for mass, but he rarely stayed now that classes at Georgetown had begun in earnest. And after Ronan had rebuffed his attempts to talk yesterday, Declan had stayed mercifully quiet all through the service this morning. He was still in town for the alumni weekend. But Ronan wasn't expecting to see much of him. Ronan had been gloriously rude in the rebuffing. And Declan had other work to do, work more suited to him than being anyone's brother. Ronan had the impression that he was out there somewhere making connections on the main Aglionby green, among the sea of white plastic chairs and blue-striped tents and elderly men wearing class pins.

"Yeah. He's right over there," said Henry Cheng, and pointed at the far end of the courts.

Declan had not stayed out on the green. He was seated on the spectator benches in a sleek lightweight suit and expensive coat. He seemed to have been waiting for Ronan to notice him and rose as if on cue, making his way across the court with a very deliberate stroll that put Ronan in mind of Niall. It was profanity to see that stroll from Declan. 

"Fuck," Ronan breathed out.

Henry only gave him a satisfied and strode off in the direction of the fallen Tad. 

Ronan had brief, wild dreams of felling Declan the same way he'd felled Tad, but Declan was a Lynch and a wiser opponent. His stroll retained all its deliberation, but somehow he sped up enough to be at Ronan's side in an instant, wrenching the racket out of Ronan's grasp.

That was rude of him. Ronan punched him in the jaw.

"Boys," said Coach Torres from somewhere not far off. Hard to tell where when Ronan could see nothing but Declan, his father, and Adam Parrish. "Boys, boys."

"Don't be an asshole, Ronan," Declan said. He'd rolled easily with the punch and wasn't as hurt as he should have been. Ronan could fix that. Declan sidestepped and moved to put him in a hold. Ronan aimed a savage kick at his calves.

"I'm dressed for the luncheon, Ronan, you piece of shit," Declan said, grappling with him.

"So go to your fucking luncheon," Ronan growled. 

"Oh, boys," said Coach Torres, calmly befuddled by this behavior. "I'm going to call my husband about Alicia's bat mitzvah now, and when I come back I hope you'll be done." 

"I don't think that's enough time for Ronan to grow up," Declan told her retreating back. He grunted in pain as Ronan jabbed him viciously in the gut with an elbow, breaking his hold. 

"Give me back my racket and leave me the fuck alone," Ronan said.

Declan said, "I should break the racket over your head." 

But he didn't do that. Instead, dodging Ronan again, he reached into his jacket, removed a sheaf of papers, and tossed them in Ronan's face. Ronan reeled back, more surprised than anything, as they floated with odd grace to the ground. He could tell that Cheng and Carruthers were making comments behind him, but not what they were saying -- they seemed removed, another world. He tasted something in his mouth. It tasted the way it felt to be burned. He lunged, and was satisfied to hear Declan's affronted yell as his coat and luncheon suit collided with the court.

Declan grabbed for the nearest sheet of paper and shoved it at Ronan's teeth.

"It's the will," Declan forced out.

It was the will. Ronan's will. The correct will; the one that meant he could go home. Niall Lynch's last instruction. And Ronan could see that scattered on the ground there was a second document, too: what he and Declan had agreed on shortly after, after Declan had decided that Niall trusting Ronan meant Ronan could be trusted. It was a document naming Ronan official decisionmaker for Aurora Lynch. Declan had been Aurora's former guardian, per the terms of an agreement that had existed outside the initial will. 

Declan took advantage of Ronan's momentary surprise. He shoved the will, together with his fist, against Ronan's teeth, catching him off guard and forcing him to the ground in an instant. 

The will made a strange noise when it crinkled. Or crinkled wasn't the right word. The universe was certainly expecting a crinkle. Instead it got a faint, mournful violin. 

With Ronan off of him, Declan stood, then tore the agreement about Aurora. It tore. Nothing to it beyond that. But then he stooped and picked up the will and tore that too. The violins wailed. Ronan could vaguely remember the sound being softer when he'd first dreamed the will -- in fact, he'd been so triumphant and the sound so muted that he hadn't seen the connection. He'd assumed a kind of carryover from the dream, the ringing of victory in his ears. 

"Apparently every new hard copy gets a little louder. It's really fucking with the attorney," Declan said. He looked down at Ronan and his next words seemed wrenched from inside him. "This was you. Did you take him up on his dare in the last will? It was a dare, wasn't it?"

"It was a promise, and it's none of your business," Ronan said. He moved his jaw. Declan had made him cut the inside of his mouth and it was bleeding. The taste of the blood was as clean as his rage had been.

"Where's mom, Ronan?" Declan said. "I called Homecare to see where you moved her. They said she wasn't with them. So I called Vista, too. And then I called Mercy Hospice. And then I called Helping Hands. I must have called _every fucking agency in the state_. Where's. Mom." 

"It's been months. Now you care?" Ronan said. 

"I wanted to visit her. She's my mother," said Declan. Underneath his crisp newscaster looks there was something brutal. Ronan doubted Declan knew it was there. 

"It's taken you months to decide you want to visit," Ronan said. "You said she was nothing without Dad, remember?"

Nothing. Aurora was nothing to Declan. Like Declan was nothing to Ronan. Ronan wasn't sorry.

"Sometimes," Declan forced out. "I dream about doing to you some of the shit you've done to me, Ronan. I really do."

"Good thing your dreams are useless then," Ronan snapped.

Declan's turn to launch himself. Ronan welcomed it. He arced with the blow, met Declan with easy fury. This was what he'd wanted all night, and now he was getting it. They rolled around on the court. Ronan could hear someone shouting something. His blood sang. 

Declan spat out, between punches, "I thought you were-- when we talked about Matthew, and you taking mom. I thought you were changing--"

"You thought wrong," Ronan spat back.

"Obviously. You couldn't have managed it, could you?" Declan managed. "Change would kill you. You crystallized into a piece of shit and you want to stay there. Well--"

_Maybe you can't grow._

Ronan had him pinned to the tennis court and had gotten eight or nine good hits in when three men with shining class pins pulled him off. Coach Torres stood watching them, and next to her was the dean of the science department, his mouth hanging open.

"Ronan Lynch!" said Dean Ackerley. "Behavior like this in front of our alumni?"

"Boys," Coach Torres said, shaking her head. "Boys."

"Are you alright, son?" said one of the men with pins.

"Boys," Coach Torres said again, a little mournfully.

But Declan only had eyes for Ronan.

"If I had your power," Declan said, struggling upright. "I'd use it to take as much from you as you've taken from me. I'd take what mattered to you. I would."

"I'd get it back," Ronan said, grinning at the way blood stained the front of Declan's very professional suit.

"Not with the kind of dreams I'd make for you," Declan spat. Then, stiffly, he allowed the sympathetic alumni to pull him away. Ronan heard him explaining as they walked back to the green. Yes, well he was spoiled all our lives. He's not right. He's messed up. He saw our father -- our father was murdered. He found the body. I can recover from a bloody nose. His damage is permanent. 

When Declan recounted the family history, it was a crisp report. The ugliness seemed to seep away. His listeners were left only with the impression that he was so strong, Declan Lynch. The fight would probably make Declan three new valuable connections. After Niall Lynch had died, Declan had taken his father's talent for dissembling and grown it to strange new heights, reaping swift rewards on his one inheritance.

 _Maybe you can't grow_.

It rang in Ronan's ears, as bad as it had been last night. He barely heard the ineffectual defenses Coach Torres mounted in his behalf, the promises of academic retribution from Dean Ackerley. He registered that he was banned from campus for the duration of the alumni weekend, which was no loss except that it cut his practice short. As he stomped to the athletic center to collect his things, he heard Cheng and Carruthers laughing. He lobbed a ball in their direction and had the small satisfaction of hearing Carruthers swear again.

But it was a small satisfaction. He banged open his locker and threw his things in his bag, eschewed showering in favor of getting the hell out of Aglionby. He wanted a drink. When he passed a massive mirror in the athletic center reception hall, his reflection showed nothing amiss. Unlike Declan, he'd gotten away largely unscathed, but his bruises would be showing up by tonight, and there was that burn taste in his mouth again. He headed for the BMW, clipping past the corner of Matthew's dorm building, sick at the idea of himself.

Maybe you can't grow. 

Physically, Ronan could, of course. But in the ways that counted he was immovable, unrelenting, not inspired to give an inch. Until he found that he couldn't; there were people he couldn't reach. It was not the loss of growing that bothered him, but what the loss of growing stood for. There was a horrible sacrifice in the idea of changing to meet someone halfway. Ronan had never known you had to do that with people. Ronan met them always or never. Full loyalty or no point. Full acceptance or nothing. 

What if they thought you weren't worth accepting? 

Disdainful Adam, fluid and strange and changeable. Ronan was hard lines and immaturity to him. No growth. No progress. Adam wanted progress. An arrow out of Henrietta. A path forward. Growth. 

Plants grew, and ideas, and Declan Lynches, growing into their lies. Did dreams grow too? Did half-dreams? Greywarens? Did they reach a halfway point, then stop? Ronan remembered the devil he'd seen facing his father, the sheer _reality_ of him. Devils did not change; there was a solid permanence, a heavy weight to evil. But dreams were more insubstantial things. Where did you class Greywarens, when it came to devils and to dreams?

He did not receive an answer. Instead he tripped over Blue Sargent. 

Ronan let out a cacophony of swears. Blue let out, "Don't you dare swear at me, Ronan Lynch." She sounded snappish. She looked, as usual, like the Salvation Army had attempted to devour her, found her unappetizing, or possibly too measly a portion, and subsequently vomited her out. 

"What are you doing here?" Ronan said.

"I wish I knew. Calla's been giving me cryptic answers all morning," Blue said. She looked irritated. She looked out of place. She was out of place. Usually, the only women at Aglionby were harassed staff or else elegant sisters and mothers and alumni wives in designer dresses. Even a normally-dressed Blue Sargent would have cut an odd sight. But this Blue Sargent was an affront to the campus, a small, determined little eyesore. Ronan would have liked her for it, if he'd been in a mood to like anything.

"That's a pretty cryptic answer," Ronan said.

"Well, what are _you_ doing here--" Blue began, apparently about to launch into a stupid question. This was Ronan's school. 

But then she looked at him for the first time and burst into laughter instead.

"What?" Ronan snapped.

"I--" she said. "You. Your clothes. Your--" 

She waved a wrist at him. The wrist was wrapped in ugly strips of ancient yellow lace. 

"You have room to talk," Ronan said.

"There's a tiny alligator on your t-shirt," Blue said. "It's like Gansey dressed you."

"If Gansey had dressed me, it would be a tiny whale," Ronan said. "At least alligators have bite."

"At least _alligators_ have _bite_ ," Blue repeated, her tone soaked through with humor.

"I had tennis practice," Ronan forced out. 

"Really a sport that calls for the bite of the alligator."

"Really you're too fucking poor to know what tennis can be like."

Blue rolled her eyes. She said, "Ball goes over the net. Ball goes over the net again. Two people run around in a little painted square trying to hit it. Wow, what a thing to miss."

They weren't going to come to any kind of agreement. Ronan shoved past her. Unfortunately, this was Blue Sargent, so she scurried to catch up with him and shoved him back.

"I told Noah I'd give this to you," she said, forcing something into his hands. "You won't dream him one. I think he's upset."

Adam's transformer. It was suddenly very heavy, like devils. Heavy like an indistinct cocktail Ronan couldn't name. The thought of what Adam had asked him to do. The thought of what Adam might know about him. The odd electric snap to Declan when he proposed what he wanted to do to Ronan. Fear. Not fear at Declan, but just a strange, formless fear.

It was too much. Not enough. Ronan wanted a stronger cocktail. He dropped the transformer in the grass and left Blue behind again.

"Hey!" Blue said. "Stop!"

Ronan couldn't imagine what she must have been like as a child: whiny, pushy, always wanting to be in on the secret. It seemed strange that there was one Blue Sargent in all the world, that she didn't come on the heels of a pack of Sargents. She should have had older siblings. Ronan would have gladly offered his. 

She kept up with Ronan doggedly, unperturbed when he reached the BMW and was still ignoring her. She waved the transformer in his face and said, "Adam gave this to Noah and you're just throwing it away!"

How horrible to be unable to tell her that Adam had thrown it away first. Talking about Adam to _Blue_ felt wrong. He couldn't name what she had done to Adam, but he held her responsible for it anyway. And in any case Ronan was not supposed to do anything nice for people. Once this had been marvelous, but now his attempts to be kind were all failures anyway, punches he couldn't roll with. And the more his kindness failed, the more he wanted someone to know about it. 

"I'm leaving," was all he said instead.

In response, she began tugging at the passenger-side door.

"What are you--"

"Calla left me here," she said. "Because I had to give this to you. She said I couldn't come home until you'd taken it."

That seemed like something Calla would do. Ronan was wary of Calla. Ronan wanted people to know him, but not the way Calla knew. People should know because Ronan had shown them, because Ronan was tattooed and snarling and dripped with dangerous markings. Not because they could slice into his head with a finger. Ronan's head had only lately become safe for Ronan, and it was a near thing. He didn't want to cede the territory.

"I'm not taking it, but get in. I'll drive you home," he told Blue. Defying Calla on both counts felt like the first right thing he'd done all day.

But as he pulled out of his parking spot, Blue revealed other plans.

"I don't want to go home," she said, fiddling with the sleeves of her jacket. It had patches sewn on. The patches were unconvincing attempts at trees, or else marginally convincing attempts at clouds. An acid trip Cabeswater hanging comically from her undersized shoulders. 

"I don't want to go," she repeated, "Because I'm mad at my mother. And my--and at Artemus. And at Calla, now. I--"

She broke off. Her face twisted towards him in the rearview mirror. She said, like she could hardly believe it herself, "Every time I think I couldn't get more furious, I get more _furious_."

"It's a lifestyle," Ronan agreed. "You'll get used to it."

She scowled. "I don't want to get used to it! I've never really gotten mad at my mother before, not like this. And not at Calla either. Do you know what that's like? When I was mad, I could talk to my mom and Calla and Persephone, and now I really can't, and maybe you don't know what that's like, to have someone and then not--"

Ronan knew what that was like. Niall Lynch had hidden early summer in the corner of his mouth, and brought it out only for his middle son. Ronan would never feel that again. Ronan knew what it was like. Ronan knew worse. But Ronan had too much to deal with without thinking of this too. Sensory overload. 

"I'm don't care," he told Blue shortly. "I'm taking you home."

"You--" she began, then switched gears. "At least let me get rid of this thing!" She waved the transformer in his face. "Let's go drop it off with Adam."

"Adam's not home," Ronan said.

Adam was with Gansey. They made a contact sport out of misunderstanding each other, but it didn't matter. What mattered was each brutal return to the friendship. Adam could do that for Gansey. 

"Right," Blue said now. "Gansey mentioned that yesterday when he--" 

The next words she ate. Ronan would have wanted to know why, except that he didn't. The on/off switch of Ronan. 

"When will they be back?" she asked suddenly. 

Ronan shrugged. 

"We could go to Monmouth," she suggested. "I mean--as long as I'm home before, before they get back. I don't want to be there when Gansey gets back."

Strange. Ronan switched on. He didn't mean to. It just happened. He knew what it was to avoid Gansey but his avoidance was not this avoidance; it was a dog wandering off the property. This was something else, something to do with the thing she and Gansey had. 

He didn't care. Maybe he did. 

"We fought," Blue admitted. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Good thing I didn't ask," Ronan said automatically. 

"Well, good," Blue said. "You don't ask and I don't tell. And we hang out in Monmouth, or somewhere else. Me and you."

She sounded half-unsure as she said it. Ronan and Blue spending Sunday together. It was two thunderbolts hugging. Blue was fine, measured out with the rest of the group. Alone, she was somehow both unpredictable and too familiar. Ronan dreamed for her, but sometimes it surprised even him. 

And he had plans. The burn taste was starting in his mouth, but this was a day to burn all the way down to his bones. He would not spend today with Blue Sargent. Against her loud protestations, he drove her home. As a minor rebellion, she left the transformer in the car when he wasn't looking. When he was back in Monmouth, he threw it against his bedroom wall and it clattered forlornly to the floor.

He itched for a fight but he'd had one, and it hadn't stuck. And Henrietta had no Kavinskys left. Only Ronan. 

He dreamed something heavy and solid and golden, swirling in its bottle. It was an illicit thing to do, but Gansey was gone. The taste was acrid and powerful on the way down; the effect was immediate. It was a loss of motion, a blank acceptance of the moment. Torpor. Life as a dream thing. He was in no danger, so when the thought of Kavinsky's green pills hit him, he ignored it and drank more. 

He was not shredded, the way he had been by the pills. This was different. There was enough left of him to collect the keys to the Pig, when the tow company dropped it off around noon. There was enough left to stop drinking and start dreaming again around five. 

Gansey hadn't returned then. He didn't return around six or seven or eight. He didn't return that night.

-

That night, Ronan dreamt that he was in the car on the way to the city, with Declan on one side and Matthew on the other. In the front, Aurora's halo of golden hair. Niall Lynch was at the wheel.

"What grows?" he asked Niall.

But Niall didn't answer. Declan did. Declan said, "Anything grows, if you plant it in the right soil."

-

Gansey didn't return on Monday. Ronan, though he never checked his phone, checked his phone. There were no messages.

He went by St. Agnes. No Gansey. No Adam.

He called Gansey. No reply.

\- 

Monday night, he dreamt that he put Adam in a dream, and left him there. He dreamt that he put the transformer in a dream, and left it there. 

When he awoke, the transformer was gone. 

-

Gansey still hadn't arrived by Tuesday morning. Blue did, in the late afternoon, in her Nino's getup, with her spiky hair falling out of its barrettes.

"Adam's gone," she began. "I've been going by St. Agnes, and--"

"I know," Ronan said. When he'd awoken and found the transformer gone, he'd felt sick. Chainsaw had behaved erratically, pecking at his thumb four times in quick succession, like she was tapping out a warning. He'd shouted for Noah. Maybe Noah had taken the transformer. But Noah had been gone all weekend, ever since Saturday. 

"I went by his job yesterday and today," she added again. "All his jobs. I told them he was sick and that's why he wasn't there."

"He's not sick," Ronan said.

"He's not. He's gone. They both are," Blue said. "Do you think it's Glendower-related?"

"No," Ronan answered, perfectly truthful.


	4. Chapter 4

The trees rang faintly as the BMW passed. Here, blossoms were glass, petals were fine colored metal. The valley grew natural windchimes. There was a river so clear that a bed of blue and silver stones was visible, polished like gems. The far mountain didn't so much grow as multiply: two mountains. Four. Eleven. The closer they came to the unfamiliar country, the more unfamiliar country there was.

And the deeper they went, the more right Gansey seemed. 

Gansey always seemed right. But here he was more right. Lavender shirt and green slacks. Lavender-silver bark on the trees. Glass green water in the streams. They were in the valley of the vibrant, where anything might happen. This suited Gansey.

Adam, next to him, was a colorless and dusty thing. 

Cabeswater was very far off. He had expected that to worry him. It did, but not as much as it seemed to worry Cabeswater. The forest was a faint panicked call. It pulsed after Adam like it missed him, like it mourned him. It screamed a desire to protect. Would it protect him in this place? Would they need protecting? 

"Look," Gansey said, taking a hand off the steering wheel to point for a moment. "Scarlet chicory. Blue cinquefoil."

Adam didn't know what that was.

"Nothing is the right _color_ ," Gansey said excitedly. "And nothing grows where it should. Magnolias on bushes, lords-and-ladies on the trees."

Adam would have to take his word for it. He knew Gansey had mentioned some aunt who engaged in competitive gardening, as though that was a normal hobby for a person to have. English hedges laid out in rows, prize-winning lines of lemon trees. To Adam, this was as foreign as the valley all around them. Adam's knowledge of nature was wilder and yet smaller. It began and ended with Cabeswater.

Cabeswater, which was trying to tell him something. Adam strained to listen. Instead, he heard the chiming of the trees. His hands closed on his tarot cards. They didn't actually do anything. They did everything. That was how Persephone had put it. All and nothing all at once. That was what magic gave you. Now Cabeswater was making them hot in his hands, and Adam marveled at how something could be hot and not burn you. Charged, like the stones around the ley line. Cabeswater wanted to burst out of these cards and fill up the cracks in this new world, take it over, cover them up and keep them safe. As if it could. Could it? Probably not, but it wanted to try. It was scared. It was so unnerved that it was ready to dare, to do the impossible. That was just what Adam would try, if he felt the same way. How strange, for something as old as Cabeswater to react in a manner so familiar to him. 

But Adam was not scared. 

He realized it after a moment, staring at the flowers and foliage, the trees with their weeping, singing boughs. He was not scared. Cabeswater was, and he had been echoing it, soothing it, murmuring after it, just as he did when the taps came on at night in his bathroom and the forest tumbled out a stream of nonsense language; or when there came a knock at the door to his apartment and in place of a visitor Adam welcomed a series of shades. Adam's role was to decipher these things, to unravel each mystery.

Mere mystery did not scare him these days.

This place was not the ley line, but it felt like the ley line. There was energy here too. The ground was saturated in it, the car was, the tinny-sounding flowers were. It might be a new line -- or perhaps an alternative to one. It didn't seem to be a line, It was a spreading pool, a great lot of power coalescing. 

Whatever it was, Cabewater couldn't seem to recognize it. And next to Cabeswater the place sparkled with newness. Wasn't that what all this was? The subtle wrongness to the details, the fantastic rightness of seeing parts of the countryside so perfectly mismatched? It felt new. It felt like an idea someone had plucked just now, from nothing, just because they could.

If Cabeswater erupted into this place it would destroy it. Or the place would destroy Cabeswater, which seemed more likely, as this place was overpowering and Cabeswater now so faint. Adam felt how the two line-spots were at cross-purposes. Cabeswater was ancient and mystical. This place was whimsy, like the energy was springing up from a geyser somewhere far below, bubbling forward, a fountain of youth on the line. Maybe it could be linked to Cabeswater somehow. But to let the forest surge into it seemed intrinsically wrong. It would be a meeting of opposites. A duel. Could he and Gansey survive a battle between two magical places?

It didn't seem likely. Cabeswater did not have a brain as much as it had masses of raw powerful thought, and so it made poor plans. Now its plan to protect Adam could put them both in danger.

_No, Cabeswater_ , he told the forest, cutting his deck and laying half of the cards out in a pattern. It was a pattern of his own making, an off-the-cuff invention. He saw in his mind's eye the ring of stones he'd created to bring Cabeswater back when Kavinsky had drained it. Battery stones. Charged up stones, full of power. Now he made a smooth ring from the pattern on his lap, and placed the second half of the deck in the center. He saw Gansey watching him in the rearview mirror, intrigued. But Adam couldn't explain it. It was instinctive.

_The Magician sees what is out there and finds connections,_ Persephone had said. _The Magician can make anything magical._

Well. Good. 

He closed his eyes and felt them grow hot under his eyelids. He didn't want Cabeswater to see the world around them, the sprawling vista outside the car. Cabeswater needed to see what he was planning instead. He passed his hands over the ring of cards in his lap. The ring would be the suits, he knew. The ones in the center would be the major arcana. Lesser secrets in a ring to protect the greater secrets. Adam hesitated. Then he made his choice.

_We'll talk through these_ , he told Cabeswater carefully, touching the ring that held the minor arcana. He needed that. He could sense Cabeswater well enough these days, but now it sounded muffled. Using the cards would make it clearer. 

Then he touched the cards in the center. 

_And these I give to you._

Power and heat drained out of the minor arcana. In the center, the twenty-two cards without suit burned. Adam marveled that Gansey couldn't feel them crackling like lightning. Cabeswater poured into them what energy it could. Adam could almost smell it, the rotting wood and cool mist smell. The cards were charged like batteries. Adam put his hands on them. Talismanic things now. Protection. Solutions.

He opened his eyes. 

"Everything alright?" Gansey asked lightly. His eyes were firmly on the road. He gave the impression that maybe they were summering somewhere, maybe they'd planned this, maybe they knew exactly where they were going. Something about him suggested it would be a place called the Cape or the Wharf or the Island, the kind of place you didn't have to name if you knew it. Full of pearls and boat shoes and seersucker jackets, like the inside of a catalogue.

But this road didn't seem to go there. There was no sun-drenched coast ahead. The sun had become a moderate thing in the past few minutes. The sky was now peculiarly misty, as though it were laid over with a mother of pearl sheen to dull the blueness. And the trees lining the road were anchored in a ground that was rich and dark, reddish in parts. Not sand but farmland, working land to grow these improbable ideas in. Adam had the dirt of it coating the inside of his nails now. His clothing was sweat-soaked from the work of freeing the BMW from its planting bed. Gansey, he realized, was not much better. The lavender shirt was streaked with faint dirt smudges, and the green slacks were worse.

And, Adam realized, they were hungry. He was hungry, in a sudden and ferocious way. And Gansey had to be as well. But all they had between them was some dubious fruit picked from cars and two bottles of Otto's mysterious Miwadi.

He had twenty-two solutions, and here came the problems to match them. 

"We have to eat," he told Gansey.

Gansey said, "If you're going to swallow something that came out of a sweltering trunk in Otto's Auto yard, then I can't say that I approve. It's miraculous stuff, but I don't like getting my food from the same place I get my cars. It's like storing antifreeze next to the french dressing." 

"Maybe," Adam said. "But we have to eat." 

He gathered up the minor arcana and pocketed them, then selected only one of the major arcana before pocketing those too. He was left with the Chariot. A woman pulled by two horses, one white, one black. She simmered with energy from Cabeswater. 

Adam had taken two or three apples before. Now he took one out of the pocket of his cargo pants and scrutinized it, the burning card in one hand, the shiny red perfection of the apple in the other. Gansey gave the apple a pained look.

"Adam," he said. He was able to put quite a lot of warning in his tone, the honeyed warning of someone who was used to being in charge. Adam didn't pay much attention to it except to feel a slight pang. He didn't know anymore whether he was supposed to hate that side of Gansey. He realized that he didn't. It would be like hating Cabeswater. 

He bit into the apple. He didn't know what he expected it to taste like -- poison, if poison had a taste. Or maybe he expected it to be rotting on the inside, an unpleasant surprise, so that if he looked back after the initial bite he'd see the hole where a worm had burrowed in. But there was no hole. It was mild, crisp, normal. It didn't kill him going down. It did nothing but behave exactly like an apple.

In the time it had taken for him to realize this, Gansey had pulled over.

" _Adam_ ," he said again. He said it low and firm now. His voice reached out and corralled the world tight, the sheer recklessness of Adam's actions contained in both syllables of Adam's name. The disappointment of it. 

Underneath it there was something Adam couldn't place, but which sounded a little like fear. It shamed Adam. The rest of Gansey's tone was infuriating, but this submerged anxiety hooked Adam tight. He put the apple down. He surged forward and took Gansey's wrist, guided his hand to the ley-charged tarot card. It was an echo of something. D.C., he realized. He'd grabbed Gansey then too, in anger, when he ought to have been ashamed but wasn't. Now that he was ashamed, he acted to correct his earlier actions. He pressed the card into Gansey's fingers.

"You feel it?" he said urgently.

He supposed for a second that Gansey might not be able to feel it. He was surprised at how unhappy the thought made him. Having magic, seeing magic where Gansey didn't. Having anything that Gansey didn't -- shouldn't it be satisfying? He had dreamt about it enough times. But Gansey searched for magic like he needed it to breathe. Adam's shame deepened, to think that he might ever have wanted to deny it to him. 

Gansey's fine fingers closed around the card. He blinked rapidly. Slowly, he smiled the exquisite smile of finding what he was looking for.

"Why is it like that?" he asked quietly. All traces of Gansey in charge were gone. This Gansey was whole and curious. 

Adam chose his words carefully. "Cabeswater wants to protect us. It--it can't come here all at once. It's far away, and anyway I don't think it would survive coming here. This place is incompatible with it. But Cabeswater's on the ley line. It's got energy. It can charge things up. So if we need it--"

He broke off. Somehow making the magic concrete like this, reducing it to words, made it seem less real. He knew that Gansey wouldn't understand this if he explained. Gansey used words to make things sharper, give them strength, define them, control them.

"This will help us?" Gansey asked sharply, looking for confirmation.

In response, Adam took the card back. He reached for the major arcana and cut the cards in half again. Eleven he kept. Eleven he held close for only a minute.

_Do for him what you would do for me,_ he told Cabeswater. Cabeswater was distant and not as eager to answer as he might have liked. It was a mercurial, unsafe place, especially for people who weren't Adam or its beloved Greywaren. Sometimes he forgot that. But he felt the energy in the cards leap and lick, restless. Trapped magic, the magic Cabeswater had poured away for his protection here. Magic that was eager to work, it didn't matter for whom. Good. 

_Protect him as you would me_ , he told the cards. Then, without even bothering to see which ones they were, he passed these eleven cards to Gansey.

"It's magic," he told him simply. "But it's magic that has an interest in keeping us safe."

Keeping him safe, because he was Cabeswater's hands. But now keeping Gansey safe as well. Adam was Cabeswater's hands, but his mind and choices were his own. 

Gansey took the cards carefully, laying them out on the armrest below the stick shift, examining them closely. Adam examined him, this king on a quest in a strange land. He felt sudden, powerful relief at the thought that he could be here with Gansey. Whatever waited here -- be it Glendower or some other pocket of the ley line entirely -- shouldn't, and now couldn't, touch Gansey.

"Well, then I guess this won't hurt," Gansey said, and popped open the glove compartment to reveal the drinks. He grabbed one of the blue bottles. With one hand on the cards, he took a thirsty swig. Adam watched his perfect tanned throat swallow it down.

"It's fruit cordial," Gansey reported, grinning. "Black currant?"

Adam tried it. It didn't kill him. It tasted too-sweet and almost medicinal, very strong and possibly a little alcoholic. He squinted at his bottle worriedly. 

"Oh," Gansey said, staring at him. "I don't think it's--well. Even if it isn't, it's got too much sugar. Let's go out and find a stream or something, get some water."

He gathered his cards neatly and tucked them into the breast pocket of his button-down, above his heart. Then they climbed out. Gansey experimentally popped the trunk and found some very improbable blackberries growing within. They each took handfuls and ate them messily as they went past the edge of the road, into the singing trees, where they could hear the stream in the distance. The pearly mist had deepened. When Adam stepped on the grass, it made a sound like faint pipes. The trees around them were covered in a moss so green it nearly shone, and Gansey touched it only to have it arch and purr at him like a cat. Above them, the huge blue-purple flowers chimed.

They came to a stream that had diverged from the main river and now bubbled independently, deep in the wood. Gansey rolled up his chinos and shirt cuffs and removed his boat shoes. He waded in, taking the opportunity to splash away some of the dirt on him. Adam went a little further upstream and cupped the clear water in his hands, taking a long drink before stripping off his own shoes and joining Gansey. It felt good. There was moss on the floor of the stream like an underwater carpet, soft and not at all slippery despite the wet.

"This will help get us to Glendower," Gansey said, after a few minutes. 

He was not asking. He was certain. He stretched, his elbows pointed at the sky, his arms making triangles with the broad line of his shoulders. In the ringing, green forest, he seemed perfectly at home, a wilder king that Adam had ever given him credit for.

"Glendower is underground," he reminded Gansey.

Gansey tapped the mossy stream bed with one foot, like if he just applied enough pressure he could crack the world open and there Glendower would be, waiting for him. 

"The road brought us here," Gansey said simply. "And I've been looking for him for seven years. It's time, I think, that he start looking for me, too."

He said it like he'd wanted that, secretly, for some time. It felt heavy. It felt horribly peculiar in a way Gansey rarely admitted to people: that he wanted this mythic figure to want him. To look for him. To lead him off the path. The secret, strange heart of Gansey, with desires more irrational than he'd ever let on about.

Adam wasn't sure what to say. In the misty light, Gansey looked very young, and Adam remembered how he'd found Gansey's approach to the quest so conservative, how he'd hated Gansey's patient waiting and caution. How he'd wanted to act. Had acted.

Then he remembered Blue telling him truth: that Gansey was to act. Gansey was to walk the corpse road.

Adam wiped his hands on his t-shirt and dipped them into his pockets. He fingered the talisman cards. Eleven for him. Eleven for Gansey. For protection.

He was glad, suddenly, that he was here with Gansey. 

-

"What do you mean?" Blue asked. "What do you mean: in a dream?"

She couldn't tell if it was a good thing or a bad thing. Cabeswater was dreamlike, and they'd been there. But then so was Jesse Dittley's cave, and the cave of the third sleeper. Where did dreams end and real life start, really? It was something she'd always found very clear before. Dreams were the things you didn't really have, the _something more_ you wanted but had to do without. Real life was anything you did have, whether you wanted it or not: Nino's, Fox Way, Maura holding her and comforting her when she was upset, yogurt, a dull school day, readings with Calla, Orla playing loud music in the bathroom at 3 A.M.

She could appreciate, though, that for someone like Ronan the distinction was irrelevant.

She remembered how she'd thought he was more raven than most. More raven than boy, really. He was that. But he was boy, too, in fact in some ways more boy than regular person. He had never seemed to want for anything, for any _something more_. Adam had want in him, brittle and painful and barely concealed. Gansey's want was a hidden treasure. But Blue realized that she'd never been able to pinpoint what it was Ronan Lynch wanted, really wanted. What didn't he have?

Was this how you made a person wild, by letting them have anything they liked? Did people grow wilder when they could grab their dreams and make them real, when anything was in reach? 

It made sense to Blue, who'd always wanted to be wild. She was wilder, less plain old sensible, in her happiest moments.

So the great shock was that it didn't seem to make Ronan especially happy. Before her now, he gave the impression of being caged and uncertain. The lines of his tattoo creeping up his neck suddenly looked dreadful, bars inked on his skin. He paced the main room at Monmouth, a great thing with its wings clipped, the normal brutal handsomeness of him marred by some unsettled element.

"Does it sound like it's a good thing?" he barked at her. "They haven't been back in three days. Does that sound good to you?"

"I wouldn't know! I'm not the expert on dreams," Blue said snappishly back.

Ronan scowled. He looked more dangerous and savage with the scowl on, which meant it was a better look for him, a look that seemed more suited to the boy she'd come to know.

"It's not a good thing," he said shortly. He sat on the edge of Gansey's bed and buried his head in his hands, a dramatic gesture that told Blue he was done being scowly and back to pure old boy.

She replayed what he'd told her. He'd taken the transformer and dropped it in a dream. _Why_ was a question probably better not answered. It could have been because he'd felt like it. He was not Gansey or Adam, both belonging to the tribe of people that had reasons for their actions. In this sense Ronan was closer to Noah, and Noah was dead, so Blue wasn't sure where that left Ronan Lynch.

Noah.

"Is Noah in a dream too? Did he go with them?" she asked abruptly. She hadn't seen Noah since Sunday. For Noah, that was unusual. Blue could usually count on him to check in with her regularly, a shadow searching for a sun to give it definition.

"How should I know?" Ronan said. 

"Well, wasn't it your dream?" she demanded. "Who told you to go around dropping people in dreams, anyway?"

The return of the scowl, which slipped onto Ronan's face with such ease that it seemed to want to pretend it had never left.

"I didn't dream that I did it to Noah. And I don't think Noah can go anywhere that isn't close to the ley line," he said.

"Isn't the dream on the ley line?" asked Blue. It sounded ridiculous when she said it out loud, and it made Ronan look haughty and secretive, someone who didn't need to verbalize things to know them. As though he had anything to look haughty about. She stuck to it. It made sense. Dreams were linked to the ley line, or else taking things from them wouldn't drain the line. She wondered if Noah hadn't slipped into dreams before. Why wouldn't he? 

It seemed like very daring behavior for Noah, though.

"I don't know where the dream is," Ronan muttered now. "I don't--I dreamed I put Parrish away in one. That's all. I don't know which one, or where it went."

"Parr--Adam? Not Gansey?" Blue said, startled by the omission. "Then what happened to Gansey? How do you even know you did this?"

"It's something we'd talked about," Ronan said, after a minute. "Me and Parrish. And it just. It fits."

"You don't really know," Blue said. 

He probably had no idea how his powers really worked. If it had been Gansey, he would have researched until he understood himself. If it had been Adam, he would have worked and worked until he as good as understood. But this was Ronan Lynch. He didn't operate like that. 

"Did you ask Cabeswater?" Blue said pointedly. "Or you could have come over to my house. My mother might know, or Calla."

"Did _you_ ask your mother or Calla?" Ronan fired back. Blue rolled her eyes. He was, she realized with all the secret superiority of one who had variously been the eldest, youngest, and middle-est person at 300 Fox Way, depending on who was present at 300 Fox way -- he was entirely a middle child. Combative. Orla was like that. Too old for her behavior, but somehow still youthful in the worst way.

"I thought I'd check and see if they were here," Blue told him shortly. "But now that I know _you_ know they've been missing, and haven't done anything, I guess I'll do it myself!"

She turned on her heel and left, trying to slam the door behind her. It did not obligingly slam; it just dragged itself closed. Monmouth suddenly seemed in many ways a very disagreeable space, as disagreeable as Fox Way had become, with all its shrieking and fighting and mysterious fatherly cursing.

The truth was: she could have asked Maura and Calla. She should have, as soon as it became clear that Adam was missing. But she hadn't wanted to. Her mother was suddenly unpredictable and untrustworthy, and Calla a shade unfamiliar . And Blue hadn't yet known it was serious -- she'd assumed Adam was with Gansey, and that Gansey was fine, if currently fighting with her. Really fighting with Gansey was so new that he might have been merely avoiding her. She remembered him confessing, once, that he used to pack up and leave people behind. When things got too hard. When he wanted to. He'd said it like he thought it was shameful of him, and at the time Blue hadn't agreed, because any secret shame of Gansey's had felt like a precious thing to be entrusted with.

But it was shameful.

Had he left? Would he do that? It seemed unthinkable. Henrietta was his home. 

Blue was suddenly furious with him, with this wild and capricious Gansey she'd never really met. How could he leave, and leave her to hear it from her mother or Calla? She dreaded it. Calla's touch on her wrist, feather-light, and then the words,

_He's gone, chicken._

Her hands shook when she laid them on the handlebars of her bicycle. A part of her argued that maybe it would be better. He wouldn't die that way. Another part wondered about Adam, if he'd taken Adam with him, if Adam had decided to go, if Adam was arguing with him, trying to get him to come back. A small part of her trusted Adam to do that, but a bigger part wondered why, and why she thought Adam would do anything for her. They were friends. But there might be something shattered there, too.

If she'd had the boy-ness of Ronan Lynch, this never would have happened. To be wild and secure like that seemed the greatest thing. She wanted to kick off and go down the road beyond Monmouth, leave Henrietta herself. She wanted to be part raven and untouchable. She wanted to go to college, and meet someone she wasn't going to hurt or kill.

A hand closed on the handlebars before she could go anywhere.

"Come on," Ronan said roughly. "We'll take my car. It'll take half the time if we just do it together. We'll go to Cabeswater first."

She looked up at him. He was the tallest boy she knew, which was another bit of unfairness, so she had to look up. But she put all the power of looking down on someone into her gaze. She supposed that was something Ronan wouldn't be used to, since he went to Aglionby and all, but she'd had years of Aglionby boys looking at _her_ like this, so she knew she wasn't bad at it. Switchblade eyes. 

"Come on," Ronan said again. Impatient. A walking switchblade himself. 

"You could go to Cabeswater and I could ask my mother," Blue said, not feeling up to going anywhere with him at the moment. Besides, if Gansey had packed up and gone, she didn't want Ronan Lynch there when Calla or her mother broke the news.

"It's faster if we just do it in one go," Ronan said, rolling his eyes. "Come on."

He was right. Irritated, she swung off the bike. He picked it up easily and put it in his trunk, which was the least he could do, so Blue let him do it. He tossed some things in after it, but Blue couldn't see what they were. She took the front seat of the BMW for the second time this week, and this time it was both more comfortable than the last and less. Less comfortable because now she didn't particularly feel like she wanted to be anywhere near Ronan Lynch. More comfortable because now she had the clean angry feeling that she shouldn't have to be anywhere near Ronan Lynch if she didn't want to be.

"I hope it's not true," Ronan said, as he started the car, shooing Chainsaw into the backseat. "The dream thing."

"Why would you think it would be?" Blue snapped.

Silence. 

"Oh, fine, don't tell m--" 

"We fought," Ronan said shortly. "Me and Parrish."

It was somehow the last thing Blue had expected to hear and also the last thing she wanted to. It prodded at something in her. She'd fought with Gansey, too. It all felt improbably connected. Events that mirrored each other. She was unsettled.

"Why?" she demanded.

"Like I said, we talked about putting things inside dreams instead of taking them out. He wanted to. I didn't."

It sounded like Adam. Like he'd drawn some strange connection the others hadn't even begun to think of. And it fit with him, somehow, with the homey Henrietta-ness of him, tea and summer evenings and cicadas. Put something in a dream and keep it safe, keep it tucked away. She said as much, wondering aloud.

"No," Ronan said. His knuckles were white on the steering wheel. "Not like that. That wasn't what he wanted at all."

"How would you know?" Blue said, crossing her arms and turning away. 

"He's been helping me with my powers. Practice. Trust me: I know him."

"The two of you just have practice sessions?" Blue asked incredulously. "What, just to yourselves? Does Gansey come?" 

How horribly like a bunch of raven boys.

"No," Ronan said.

"Of course. No, why would you and _Adam Parrish_ ever think to invite anyone else? Why would you--"

Ronan's voice was pure frost. "Do you invite me when you and Gansey go driving late at night?"

Blue flushed. "That's different!" she said. Then she belatedly realized that she didn't want to have to explain why it was different. She didn't know if Ronan knew about her furtive calls to Gansey. She realized that a part of her had assumed he did -- Noah certainly knew. But a part of her also assumed Ronan would tell Adam. Ronan didn't tolerate betrayal.

"It's really not different," was what Ronan said instead.

Blue calmed. He had no idea. Or he had no intention of telling Adam. He didn't like betrayal, but it seemed like Ronan Lynch to keep the secret. He gave the impression that secrets roosted on him.

"I think it is different," Blue said quietly, more to herself than to Ronan.

"I think it's really, really not," Ronan said.

Blue scowled at him in the mirror, and he scowled back. In their combined dedication to winning the scowl-off, they almost missed the turn-off that would take them to the field before Cabeswater. Blue caught sight of it and hit Ronan on the arm. Cursing, he turned the BMW off the main road and in short time they were trudging up the slope to the forest, Chainsaw circling above them. The trees before them rustled without a breeze. It made Blue uneasy, gave the impression of some disorder. Next to her, Ronan swore again and then broke into a run, leaving her behind.

When she caught up with him, he was in the clearing where his mother waited. Aurora Lynch reclined happily on the grass. She was beautiful and empty, a woman made of glass and designed to be filled up with other people's desires. Blue was often irritated to find that she liked Aurora. She gave Aurora a terse hello. Aurora smiled beatifically in response. 

"They haven't been here since you last were," she told Ronan. "Only Matthew." Then, interested in a vague and lovely way, "Where is Matthew?"

"He's probably gone to meet Declan today. Declan's on campus for the weekend," Ronan reported, his tone clipped.

"Declan?" said Aurora, furrowing her brow. She seemed to be reaching for something and not finding it. She looked like that a lot, though. 

"Oh," she finished, coming up even emptier than before. "Oh."

"I have to ask Cabeswater a question, okay?" Ronan told her. "It's nothing for you to worry about. You stay here. You need me to get you anything?"

"No," Aurora said. She seemed bewildered by the thought that she might have needs of her own. "I'm fine. I'll stay here."

Ronan held her briefly, close and quick, like she was something too precious to use up all at once. Then he started for the cave. Blue followed, giving Aurora an awkward wave. When Aurora returned it, looking pleased, Blue felt a little guilty, though she couldn't say for what. 

They stopped inside the cave. Ronan bit his lip. He put one hand on the rough rock wall and began to speak in Latin, uncertain, and though Blue had heard he was good at Latin she always wondered, really, if someone was pulling her leg. She couldn't tell either way, but it seemed to her that maybe Ronan was just the best at Latin and actually they were all pretty bad at it. Most Aglionby boys didn't actually have to be good at things.

Whatever Ronan was saying now had a lot of _ubi_ and _magus_ and _amicos_. Blue could put the last two together well enough. Cabeswater seemed to charge up around them, the air becoming hot and heavy. It said something to Ronan in response. 

He stiffened.

"What?" Blue demanded.

"They're lost," he said. "Cabeswater says they're lost. They've been lost since they left. And Cabeswater says that whatever has them -- they need protecting from it."


	5. Chapter 5

Ronan and Chainsaw and Blue tore out of Cabeswater so fast that Ronan worried, briefly, for his mother. That she might worry about him. That she hadn't heard the instruction he'd shouted: don't worry, don't worry. He hoped she had. If she'd heard, she'd be fine. 

Niall used to tell her the same. He would stand in the driveway, the heart of the Barns. 

"Don't worry," he would say. 

He'd be gone for months. She'd always listened and never worried. None of them had. Her cheer would infect all three boys in turn, so that of instead of waiting on the porch, gazing anxiously up the damson-dotted drive, Ronan and Declan and Matthew could go about the intervening months secure. Why worry? Mom wasn't worried.

Ronan's mother had always made sense by the rules of the Barns, but now a lot of things about her made more sense. That was one of them. 

Now Ronan drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, ignored Blue's huff next to him. How could he have let almost three days pass? It had seemed regular. He hadn't worried. Like a dream thing himself. Now he made up for it. Anxiety knotted inside Ronan, at the base of his neck, in every hollow of his tattoo, along his knuckles. 

_They are lost, the magician is lost._

_He has given away half of his protection._

_Find him. Find him, Greywaren._

To have Cabeswater ask him for something. It was wrong. More wrong to have Adam gone, and Gansey too. Ronan couldn't shake the feeling -- no, the knowledge -- that it was tied to his dream somehow, that he was somehow responsible. He'd put Adam in a dream. He'd wanted Adam in a dream, a contained thing. Not forever, just for a moment. If he could hold the moment, then maybe he could learn how to _talk_ to Adam. Why was it so painful? Saying the right things. He couldn't do it. He was like a dream. He stayed the same. He couldn't grow. 

Adam in a dream would understand. He wouldn't grow, either. He'd be an elegant, sullen, perfect thing. Ronan's. Just for a moment.

Lost.

Ronan swore, and cut in front of the Ford in the next lane. The driver honked furiously. Blue shrieked, "Are you crazy?"

In response, Ronan said, "He left his glasses. Gansey." 

He'd tossed the case in the trunk next to Blue's bicycle. Calla would be able to do something with the glasses, he thought. It was another bad sign: Gansey without his glasses. Gansey wearing his contacts for three days straight. They gave him headaches when they were in too long, he'd reported once, sheepishly. High astigmatism in his right eye. So he needed to keep the glasses on hand. Really he ought to be wearing them most days.

After Blue had stormed out of Monmouth, Ronan had looked up and seen Gansey's glasses' case sitting on his desk. He hadn't really needed Cabeswater to tell him they were lost. He'd known.

He'd brought Adam's box along, too. The shabby shoebox Adam had used to carry his Transformer. It was the one thing he had of Adam's. Adam left no footprints when he came to Monmouth. 

"Just because they're lost doesn't mean they're in a dream," Blue said now. She bit her lip. "They could be -- they could have left on purpose."

"Left?" Ronan said blankly. He barely processed what she meant. He clipped a corner near the Henrietta drugstore so fast that he knocked over a garbage bin.

"Hey!" Blue said. "That's--you're being the _worst_ kind of Aglionby boy right now."

"You wouldn't know what the worst is," Ronan said dismissively. "You don't go there. Why would they leave?"

A long-ago agitation played a tune in his head. He'd had the same fear. Gansey and Adam, Adam and Gansey. Gansey leaving without him, but taking Adam. There had been a time when he hadn't admitted even to himself why that might hurt: losing them both. He'd be played then. Left behind. Something they didn't need. He thought of what Gansey looked like in a t-shirt, and what Adam looked like when he looked at Gansey. How horrible to be played. How played he'd already felt when Gansey had introduced them for the first time, produced the boy Ronan had only been staring at since Adam had begun at Aglionby. As though he were something wonderful out of Gansey's own pocket. And why shouldn't he be? Gansey was a brother, a king. To be in his pocket was no insult.

Ronan hadn't yet known that Adam Parrish wasn't kept like that. Adam's rules were not Ronan's.

"They wouldn't leave," he said shortly. "Gansey wouldn't leave--"

_Me_ , he wanted to say. _You._

"Henrietta," he finished. 

He thought Blue would argue with him. Blue excelled at arguing. She stored up arguments four times her size in the pockets of her makeshift skirts. 

Now she just said, "Yeah. That's true."

Ronan generally didn't spare a thought for whether he liked her or not, but just then he liked her. 

300 Fox Way sat shabbily on the curb. They pulled up to it. Ronan removed Blue's bicycle and passed it off, then picked up Adam's box and the glasses case. Chainsaw took up a guarded perch on his shoulder, knowing who they were going to see. They climbed the sagging step and passed into the house. The entrance was, as always, an jumble of mats with cheerful printed slogans, discarded footwear in various sizes, jackets that seemed to belong to no one hung on mismatched pegs, an umbrella stand with all the junk mail left in it. Before Ronan had regained the Barns, he'd hated coming here. There was a lived-in quality to this house that was too familiar. A taunt. 

Calla was already waiting in the reading room. She and Ronan regarded each other. She was a mountain of a woman, and she could touch things she wasn't supposed to. Ronan knew the language of touch -- touch made more sense than words sometimes. Niall could say three separate things with the same touch. His hand on his eldest son's shoulder directed him, aimed him. His hand on his youngest son's shoulder's cheered, prompted an answering smile. His hand on Ronan's shoulder pulled him in, brought him close. 

Niall's words had lit up each season: tall tales to conceal like snowdrifts in the winter, laughter glimmering along in the orchards in the spring, the clear and pale sunshine of his instruction in the summer, wild golden promises in the autumn. Niall had been a giant that way. But through touch, not words, he'd been at his best. Through touch, he'd never lied. 

How Ronan hated to see his echo in someone who was nothing like him. Niall had sucked in every corner of the outdoors, dragged the stars into his eyes, and the red sunsets behind the western mountains, so that when he was gone there was a faint hole for the wind to wind through, wailing: _did you know? Did you know? He left last night with his foot on the gas pedal._ But Calla was his opposite. Nothing sucked into her. She instead seemed to fill up the indoors, the small room moth-eaten and ramshackle and tinier than ever next to her majestic, permanent muscle. She was solid and immovable, a goddess in a tank top and yoga pants. Candles sputtered around her like they were bowing their heads. Ronan longed for the flickering, amenable, pale witchery of his mother. 

"I don't have all day," Calla said.

Ronan went in. At some point Blue had walked in before him, and now she was glaring at him like she could tell he hadn't noticed. The greatest insult you could offer Blue Sargent was not to notice her. Ronan almost wished he could relate, except that wishing that was stupid. He'd never had that problem.

Ronan had been in this room before, but he'd never sat down. He realized that the table was set for three, and had the uncomfortable feeling of slipping into someone else's spot. Someone else sat here normally, Blue's mother or Persephone. He and Blue seemed to be echoing something else, something that wasn't for them. Ronan didn't like that. He decided to get it over with. He shoved the box and glasses case across the table at Calla. Blue started, the movement was so sudden.

She said, "You didn't have t--"

"What do you see?" Ronan growled.

"I see that it's a good thing I never instituted that policy of 'if you make me touch it, it belongs to me,'" Calla said, reaching for the the box. "People bring me total crap all the time."

"It's Adam's," Ronan said.

"Obviously. I didn't think it was the pretty one's," Calla said. But she said it low and distant, like she was concerned with something else. Whatever the box was showing her. She didn't reveal it immediately. She reached for the glasses case instead. Furrowed her brow. Opened it, took out the glasses, put them back in. Put the case down. Picked up the box. Put it down. Touched them both at once.

"Oh," she said.

"What?" Blue demanded, before Ronan could say anything. 

Calla stared at Ronan. He'd never seen her puzzled before. Now she was puzzled. He'd have thought it would be funny, but it wasn't.

"You've been there before," she said abruptly. "Where they are."

The dread that was already pooling inside him danced along the whorls of his tattoo, coated the inside of his throat.

"I told you," he said to Blue furiously. "I told you. They're in my dream--"

"I didn't say that," Calla cut in. "We don't know that. But the place they're in is a place you've been. It's for you."

"It's my--"

"It's not _yours_ ," Calla said. "It's definitely not yours. But it's for you. And they're the first visitors in a long, long time. It wants them both."

"What wants them both?" Blue asked.

Calla waved a hand.

"The _there_. I've never seen a there like it, so don't ask me to describe it, because it's like describing a snarkapiflle."

Blue said, "What's--"

"Exactly. You don't know what that is and neither do I," Calla said.

Blue looked as aggressive on the outside as Ronan felt on the inside. Even her hair seemed spikier. Chainsaw cawed at her approvingly.

"Why have they been there for almost three days?" Ronan demanded.

"What makes you think it's been three days for them?" Calla asked. "Time can be fast or slow. For them it's going slow right now."

"So they should've gotten bored and come back by now," Ronan insisted. _Slow_ sounded like torture. Why weren't they trying to get back to Henrietta yet? Could they? Could they leave? If it was a dream, then maybe they couldn't. Maybe they were trapped until the dream vanished and they vanished with it.

Calla rolled her eyes. "Slow doesn't mean they know it's going slow. It feels the same as usual to them. Time's more flexible than you're giving it credit for. And this place uses up a lot of time and uses it at different rates, like it's new and hasn't got the hang of time yet."

"And Ronan's been there?" Blue put in.

Calla nodded. "He knows the place."

"Where have you been that's like that?" Blue asked him.

"Nowhere," Ronan growled, irritated. "If it's new, why would I have been there yet?"

"Time's more flexible than you're giving it credit for," Calla said again, this time slowly, like she was speaking to a moron. 

Blue furrowed her brow. "Time's a circle," she said.

"Exactly," said Calla, like that made sense. "This place is new. But I'd say it's been new for a while. It just keeps re-using its newness, so that less time has passed for it than for us."

"So can they come back from it?" Blue asked. "Or are they--are they trapped? Because maybe they don't know they've been gone so long."

Silence. After a moment, Calla admitted, "That's hard to say."

"Say it anyway," said Ronan.

"No," Calla said. "I don't like making false promises. Even without the time thing, this place wants them both there. It doesn't want to let them go."

"Why would this place want them?" Blue said. "Does it have to do with Glendower? Or Cabeswater or something? Cabeswater said they were lost."

"Lost just means they can't be found by Cabeswater," Calla said, like this wasn't alarming. Ronan and Blue stared at her. Again she rolled her eyed, and then she touched one hand to the box and the other to the glasses case. She said, simply, "Nope. That's all I have."

Someone behind Ronan laughed. It was a cawing laugh like there were birds trapped in her throat, and Ronan's dread was promptly evicted by pure irritation. Gwenllian. Next to him, Blue looked like something foul had spat on her shoe.

"Two friends, a young man of mud and a younger man of gold," Gwenllian cooed. "Came to a tree in the forest. And the man of mud parted it with his sword, and out flowed the blood of the tree, and turned to water. And he said, 'Let us part, but I will return in six months to this spot to meet you here, and then again six months after, and then again six months after.'"

She moved into the room and stood behind Blue's chair, where she towered. When she tried to play with Blue's hair, Blue made a face and batted her away, but Calla stood and towered back.

"Leave Blue alone and get out," she said calmly, not unkindly. Gwenllian ignored her.

"'But should one of us ever come and not find the other, and should we see that the water has become blood again,' said the man of mud--"

"Out," Calla repeated. 

"'Then we will know the other is at death's door.' And then--"

" _Out_ ," Calla said, making shooing motions with her great muscular arms like Gwenllian was an oversized pigeon. Gwenllian dodged her. Calla followed her around the room as she leapt and twirled out of the way, each very acrobatic for her size, knocking into chairs and upsetting Chainsaw and making Ronan swear and Blue dive into a corner, out of the way.

"--the man of mud went to the east, and the man of gold to the west, and for six months they followed the pattern, until the man of gold should return one day and find the man of mud missing. And--"

Calla lunged and caught her at last, then bundled her in her arms and forced her to the door.

"--the stream ran red with blood!" Gwenllian shrieked. "And when he saw this the man of gold--"

"You stay here for a minute," Calla said. "I'll be back. She's going upstairs now."

Then she firmly frog-marched her up the stairs. As their footsteps pounded away, someone said, "Brothers."

Ronan nearly jumped out of his chair. A man with a weird face -- a face like Blue's, in some ways a _curious_ face -- materialized out of the dark space just beyond the entrance to the reading room. Like his daughter, he was slight and not much to behold. He also appeared to be eating yogurt, which suggested that he shared her culinary preferences.

"Not merely young men. Brothers. Who is this?" he asked Blue, scrutinizing Ronan. 

"Nobody," Blue snapped. "Come on, Ronan," she said, stomping over and grabbing him by the arm. Ronan wrenched it away on instinct and she went with the wrench, like she'd been taught to absorb this kind of behavior the same way Ronan had been taught to roll with a punch.

"Get off," Ronan hissed.

"Who is this boy?" said Artemus, rounding off each word in a curious way that made it seem like he was asking Blue to define a whole new species. 

Which was fair enough, but it pissed Ronan off.

" _Come on_ ," Blue said again, and tugged him out of the room. If Ronan hadn't been simultaneously annoyed with her and her father and her Calla and her Gwenllian, he wouldn't have let himself be tugged, but he was and in the split second it took to juggle not one but four conflicting irritations, they were already at the stairway, so what was the point? He followed her upstairs, matching her stomp for stomp and gesturing for Chainsaw to follow.

"Remember what I said," her father echoed cryptically after them. 

It seemed ridiculous to think that the maggot was an improvement on the previous generation, but then maybe she was. 

They trailed into her room. It was a place Ronan had never considered, and with good reason. Largely distasteful in a paper-mache-on-the-walls way, like she'd decorated it in kindergarten for an art project but had forgotten to take the construction paper trees down sometime in the past twelve or thirteen years.

"Why are we here?" Ronan asked. "We have to--"

What did they have to do? The uncertainty choked. Calla hadn't told them anything that made sense. Ronan felt like hitting something, but the only things for miles seemed to be paper mache trees and an oval standing mirror with plastic beads and a bra hanging on it, and a bed for perhaps a small dwarf. Ronan crossed to it and sat down, burying his head in his hands. They were lost. They were someplace new. They were someplace new that _Ronan_ knew. Ronan had been there before.

But he hadn't. Where had he been? New York City, Niagara Falls, North Carolina, Paris, Montana, Boston, Rome, Wisconsin, Indiana, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Mexico City, D.C., Colorado, L.A., Chicago, Arkansas. Texas. Disneyworld. Sarasota, Florida.

Oregon, once. There were pictures at the Barns: Niall holding Declan's hand and Declan holding Ronan's. Redwood trees and everyone smiling. Those trees looked like they'd always been old. There was nothing new about them. There was nothing new about any of those places, and none of them seemed like places that would want Gansey and Adam. Gansey would be wanted anywhere and everywhere, of course. He was suited to that, a king. But Adam--

Adam was a secret. Only Ronan knew to want him. Even Blue Sargent, with her inexplicable construction paper dwarf charms, hadn't really wanted him. 

Again a strange sick thrill. It ran through his system like a shiver. Only he had really seen or known Adam Parrish, when Gansey couldn't and Blue didn't want to. He had the irrational pride that came from that. His father had once said Aurora was one-of-a-kind, the only one in the whole world like her. When someone was one of a kind and wanted to be yours, who cared what the wind howled after you when you left?

"You have to dream us there," Blue said suddenly.

The statement was entirely stupid. It went in through the ears only to swirl senselessly in Ronan's mind.

"You. Have. To. Dream. Us. There," Blue said again. She stood before her standing mirror with her hands on her hips, suddenly appearing as solid and towering as Calla had been.

"Dream us a portal or something," she clarified, "to get to where they are."

"Why don't I just do that? Why didn't I just dream us a portal to Glendower?" Ronan said sarcastically.

She shrugged, infuriating. "I don't know! I'm not the expert on your dream powers. I never got invited to your study sessions with Adam. Maybe because you've never been to where Glendower is, but Calla says you've been to this place. So remember it, and take us there."

"I _can't_ remember it," Ronan snapped. 

Snapping at Blue Sargent was the wrong course of action. Ronan was never going to admit that it was wrong, but it was. She was on him again and tugging, and he found that he couldn't just shove her off -- or rather, he could, but he had horrible visions of Gansey standing behind her. The responsible Gansey who existed for his mother's dinners, whose voice was even and firm and very much against shoving maggots, because maggots could be told where to go, and in fact so could anyone. Small consolation that Blue probably liked that Gansey the least herself. 

She tugged him to the mirror. Ronan got to stare at her bra. He ripped it off in a fit and handed it to her just to see her go red. 

She didn't. She somehow took it -- all elastic and wires and ugly lacey purple netting -- and snapped it at him like a slingshot or a giant purple earthworm. He jumped, and barely realized he was doing it.

"Ronan. Lynch," Blue said. "I am a mirror. That--" she pointed with the bra. Ronan didn't bother looking at where she was pointing because he was too busy looking at the bra. He was reminded of the large lavender waterbugs that had appeared after Niall had had too much to drink one New Year's Eve. Matthew had wanted to keep them as pets. He'd cried bitterly when Niall had led Declan and Ronan in stomping the life out of them. 

"That is a mirror," Blue said now. "And again: _I'm a mirror_. We amplify. That's what we do. Between two mirrors, one can work a great spell."

She said that last part like she was unconvinced. Suddenly she wasn't an unexpected earthworm handler but a girl holding her bra. It wasn't really an improvement; both options filled Ronan with antipathy, it was just that now his antipathy was rather more bored.

"So what?" he said.

Blue seemed to think hard for a moment, then make up her mind. She went to her tiny bed and grabbed one post, dragging the whole thing away from the wall. She was, Ronan reflected, stronger than she looked.

"You could help," she said shortly, after she'd dislodged half of the bed and gone to drag the other half.

"I could, but I don't really want to," Ronan said.

But after a minute he did help. A part of him wanted to see what she planned to do. They dragged the bed to the center of the room, just before the mirror. It wasn't a big distance because it wasn't a big room. Then Blue darted out and returned with a folding chair, which she squeezed between the bed and the wall. She sat in it, facing the mirror.

"Well?" she said impatiently.

"No, I'm not fucking well," Ronan said. "I have no idea what the point of this was."

She pointed at her bed. "Get in," she commanded. "Dream."

Ronan regarded the bed. It was small. It was lumpy. The sheets were mismatched. It probably, he decided, smelled like the strange hippie cocktail that permeated the rest of 300 Fox Way.

"I'll pass."

"Please," Blue said, rolling her eyes again. "I don't even want you in my bed, okay? But I want Gansey and Adam back, and if this place won't give them up then we'll have to take them back. And you dreaming us there is our best chance. We don't _have_ anything else."

"Yeah," Ronan said, as a last-ditch effort to prevent the lumpy patchouli smell short-term future. "But I really don't want to climb into _your_ bed."

She flushed. "Oh, I'm so sorry!" she said. "I'm sorry my bed and I aren't up to your standards. I forgot that scores of girls go around inviting you into their beds!"

"Thankfully, they really, really don't," Ronan muttered.

He got in anyway. He felt stupid. It didn't smell like anything, except maybe the faint lived-in smell of somebody who didn't have a washer/dryer a few feet away in the bathroom, right next to the fridge. It was very cramped. He let his legs hit the top of the footboard just to make a point. Chainsaw fluttered down and perched on his shin, now one of the highest points in the room.

"Dream," Blue instructed, like it was that easy.

"About what?" he said. He stared at the ceiling rather than look at her or her reflection in the mirror. He couldn't get to where Adam and Gansey were if he couldn't make it real. He didn't know how to make it real. Calla said he'd been there, but he didn't know where it was he'd been. He closed his eyes. Next to him, he could hear Blue breathing a whiffy staccato breath.

He fell into Cabeswater. 

_Find him. Find him, Greywaren._

"Where?" Ronan demanded. He didn't know where to begin. He saw Orphan Girl peering out at him through the trees, fathomless black eyes and white-blonde hair. She didn't come out to greet him. She said, _Don't go._

Ronan blinked at her. This was new. She didn't want him to go, but Cabeswater did. Normally their wishes ran in tandem.

"Do you know where I'm supposed to go?" he asked.

She bit her lip. Shook her head. Retreated. When Ronan ran after her she was gone, hidden. All was mist and cool forest. Ronan punched the nearest tree in frustration and got a reproachful murmur from Cabeswater for his troubles. What could he dream that could show him the way?

He knew what.

When he turned around, Niall was waiting for him in the clearing. It was a returned Niall, a Niall bringing the change of the seasons back to the Barns, a Niall to silence the wind.

"Dad," Ronan said. "Do you know where they are?"

Niall beckoned him closer. When Ronan was close enough to touch he put his hands on Ronan's shoulders and pulled him in closer still. 

"Ronan," he breathed. "How is your mother? How is Matthew?"

Niall come back home. Niall playing the return script. That was Ronan's job when he was gone: to look after Matthew and his mother. 

"Dad, do you know?" Ronan asked. "Did you take me there -- where Gansey and Adam are?"

Niall breathed out in Ronan's ear. 

"No," he said. "There is no such place."

_Liar_ , screamed the wind. 

But the wind could never unseat a man like Niall. When he embraced Ronan for the last time, he traced something out on the nape of Ronan's neck. It was a path, and it ran counter to Ronan's tattoo. It ran counter to everything. A map. An entirely new idea. 

Ronan knew. 

When he opened his eyes, Niall was gone. Blue's saggy ceiling had taken his place. Ronan reached up and touched his neck and it was wet. Blood. And ink. 

"Ronan!" Blue said, giving a startled scream. 

"It's alright," Ronan told her gruffly. He stood unsteadily, evicting Chainsaw from his shin and leaving her cawing disapproval at him. As Blue looked down in horror at the blood on her pillow -- blood and ink, from the strange shallow cut on Ronan's neck -- Ronan stepped to the mirror. 

Instinct. He painted the edges of it with his blood, with the heavy black ink. All around the oval. Then stepped back, scrutinizing what he'd done. In the time it took for him to follow the pattern of his blood, the mirror became a door. He didn't see it happen. It just seemed to be something the mirror had made up its mind about. 

He could see a beach beyond, with green scrubby grasses and green water and a sandy slope lined with rocks.

"Well," said Blue behind him, sounding breathless and wild and exactly the way Ronan wanted her to sound. "That's what I meant. That's just what I meant."

"Come on, maggot," Ronan said, and stepped through.


	6. Chapter 6

Gansey had runestones and sacred carvings, boxes on boxes of them. He had ancient amulets, arrowheads. He had crates of earth taken from every ley-touched corner of the world. 

Adam's cards were better than any of that. Eleven pieces of Cabeswater, like magic was a great cake or chocolate bar, and all Adam had to do was shave off a few slices and pass them around. It was very orderly and unexpected. Adam took to magic the same way he'd taken to everything else. Quietly. Diligently. The least wild of Gansey's friends.

And so Gansey passed his fingers lightly over the cards for a moment. They seemed like a good sign. They were a good sign.

But even so. They reminded Gansey that Adam was different now. Stronger now, and stranger too. All of the quiet hard work of Adam -- and _how_ Gansey wanted that for himself, a life that did not need to seek purpose, a life that had it and breathed it in every moment -- all that was. Well. It was not gone. But magic and Cabeswater had watered it into something new. It was like finding a green shoot in the dust and assuming it might produce an oak someday, only to turn and discover it was really a towering beanstalk with giants and dangers and golden harps at the other end.

Was this what friendship was? Look away for too long, and the person could become someone new?

This idea had some hidden sting in it. Gansey blinked, focused on the road ahead, and put it away.

Next to him, Adam stared at the vibrant countryside all around them, like he was constructing a map in his mind's eye. The trees along the road were denser than before, but they sloped down to one side, giving them a bird's-eye view of that side of the valley. Every inch laid out plainly. After a moment, Adam seemed to dismiss this easy view. He turned to the passenger side, a wall of trees. After several moments, he straightened. 

"Look," he said, pointing at a spot somewhere above the trees. 

There were two spires there, dully grey and out of place behind the vibrant green. The road ahead seemed to curve to meet them. After several minutes, the trees dropped away sharply and they were in a clearing. A cathedral crouched there, stabbing the sky with its towers. It had a great door and above that a row of saints' statues, and above that a massive window with a design like bars or teeth or an old-fashioned comb. It was hideously real next to the rest of the valley, a transplanted thing.

It was full of people.

Somehow Gansey had not been expecting people, not even after Otto. Otto hadn't seemed remotely like a real person. But this was a whole community, too many people to not be real. They came pouring out of the church to the ringing of the bells. Gansey pulled up alongside the road -- there didn't seem to be any parking; how had these people come? -- and stopped the car. Next to him, Adam craned his neck to get a better view.

Gansey was reminded of places in Europe, in Peru, in New Zealand. Faces ran together, clumps of families like fruit growing on the same vine. Henrietta -- Adam's Henrietta -- had some of that. A look to an area, like every person was a pin on a map, and when the pins clustered close some secret part of the past jumped out and announced itself. The high surprised foreheads of Cesky Krumlov. The beautiful sparse eyebrows of Cajamarca. The wide-set eyes one of the first Henriettans had bequeathed to innumerable others. Gansey knew it was simplistic to think of it like that, but he didn't care. It was a lovely thought to him, the way things could carry through time and survive and survive until they seemed to give a place its definition.

The Henrietta look was slight-boned, old, the unusual homey sense of a worn photograph in a wallet. You wanted to cherish it even if you couldn't recognize it and it wasn't yours. A photograph of a stranger, sitting there looking ancient and unknowable and more quietly beautiful than you might think. It was the look that had created both Adam and Blue, each in their own way. These people did not have that. They didn't look worn or strange. They simply looked, Gansey realized, as vibrant as the valley all around. Large men and women as regally-designed as Blue's cousin Orla. Glossy, thick hair, jet black or nut brown or such a pale blonde that it seemed white. Large eyes, small noses, generous mouths. Movie stars lifted from celluloid, from a time when the movies had routinely shown people going to church in their Sunday best.

They should have been old-fashioned, but something about them seemed very new. Gansey just couldn't place what. 

"It's like their skin is new," Adam said faintly.

Gansey stared at him.

Adam looked like he was trying to put pieces together, but they wouldn't fit. But as soon as he'd said it, it had fit. Gansey had the wild sense that these people had unzipped their old skins to reveal new selves somehow, like the process of dressing for Sunday service involved some careful witchcraft. 

"I wonder," Gansey said in answer, "if they know anything about Welsh kings."

They left the car cooling in the shade and walked up the green slope to the church. When they reached the steps, the village had largely cleared off. Only a straggling child remained, tow-headed and slippery with laughter, in a frilly white dress. She made Gansey think of a small live fish hopping on a plate of frosted Italian glass. The priest was gently shooing her in the direction of her fellows. She went, tripping past Adam as she did so. Her eyes fixed on him and then hurriedly looked away, but Gansey she smiled at with far less curiosity than Gansey would have expected.

Surely this place didn't get many visitors? 

Gansey felt the wasp's prick of uncertainty. Somehow the thought that this was not some great secret, something hidden from the eyes of all others, connected to Glendower and pulsing out for him like a signal tower -- that this place might not be that had not occurred to him before. Now that it did, he didn't enjoy the doubt. He had not experienced that sense that he might be straying from his quest in some time. Not, in fact, since coming to Henrietta. 

"What's wrong?" Adam asked. 

Gansey had stopped before the great doors of the church. He became annoyed with himself for stopping and worrying Adam. The priest. There was the priest. He was a dark-haired man in white vestments, tall, and he stood some paces away, looking into the cool dark woods after the retreating crowds. He could probably answer some of Gansey's questions. If this was not a hidden treasure linked to Glendower, if this was not the knowledge Gansey sought, then the priest might be able to make that clearer. 

"Nothing's wrong," Gansey said curtly. "Come on. Let's ask the priest what he knows." Then, to the priest, "Excuse me."

The priest turned.

Gansey stepped back.

The priest was made of patchwork. Gansey saw this very clearly. The skin on his face and hands was criss-crossed, rosy in some places, pale in others. He was a man who had been stitched, of this Gansey was suddenly, resolutely sure. There had been pieces of him rolling around somewhere, and someone had lovingly gathered him and put him back together.

Then Gansey blinked and he was just a man with scars on his face.

Gansey couldn't connect it in his mind. He didn't know why he'd thought the man was patchwork.

"He's a crazy quilt," Adam said faintly.

Gansey's gaze snapped to him. His first impression had been correct. It had to be correct if Adam had seen it too. 

"Can I help you?" said the priest. "You're late for mass. I'm afraid that's it for now."

He had a slight accent. Gansey should have been able to place it, but couldn't. It was like his voice had been sanded off somehow, like a stone worn away by a river. Again the patchworkness of him came to the surface. He was just a man. But he wasn't. 

Gansey and Adam exchanged glances again. Adam now looked guarded and a little far away. Gansey put a steadying hand on his arm. He did not want Adam going anywhere, in that way Adam did. The blankness of a great distance, the aloneness of Adam that crept in around the edges. Gansey did not need that from Adam right now. 

And he did not want that for Adam ever.

"You can come in," the priest said, when they didn't respond immediately. He gestured loosely at his church. He said, "But there won't be another mass until--" He broke off and something in him looked soft and inoffensive. "--there won't be another until the bells ring for it," he finished vaguely. Then he turned and walked swiftly back to his church. 

"Come in, if you like," he said again. 

They followed him in. After Otto's car garden, Gansey was expecting the church to be made of creeping vines on the inside, or for the whole building to be carved out of one hollow tree, or to find altar boys with bells for eyes. But there was none of that. It was nice enough, candles and vaulted arches and painted saints. It had the solemn and vague grandeur Roman Catholicism held for someone like Gansey, who classed all religion as generally useful and interestingly mystical and perfectly fine for people who did not know Welsh kings were much more useful and interesting. The priest beckoned them down the long center aisle, past the empty rows of pews, and turned sharply right at the altar until he came to a small door set off to one side. He passed through. With a look at Adam and a sharp tap to the Cabeswater cards to remind them both that they were protected, Gansey followed.

He heard Adam's footsteps just behind him as they proceeded up a circular stone stairway. They had to hold the walls to steady themselves. The stairway was narrow and cramped, appropriated from medieval Europe. Gansey approved. Buildings like this could not have broad stairways. It wouldn't have fit.

At the top there was a mild little office, with filing cabinets and a crucifix, a desk and a coffee machine, muffins sitting cold on a plate. The priest made an indeterminate movement towards the coffee machine. Gansey could not tell if coffee was being offered. He hoped it was, yet didn't want to overstep by demanding. Breakfast had been scanty.

"Can we have some?" Adam asked, without preamble. His voice was soft and polite, like it usually was, but the question itself somehow bolder than Gansey's upbringing would have permitted. In this, Adam was more like Ronan now. More unfettered. A part of Gansey felt wistful. 

"Of course," the priest said. "Of course. Please." He'd been on the verge of sitting down behind his desk, but now he jumped up and produced coffee mugs and sugar. He looked almost grateful to have a task. When they all had their coffee he sat down again and said, without preamble, "I'm Father Tierney. I haven't been a Father for very long, though. Are you from here? You're not from here, are you?"

He said this eagerly. He had small, intelligent eyes in his patchwork face. They flitted from Adam to Gansey like they were looking for something.

"We came from Henrietta," Gansey allowed.

"Where is--Oh. It doesn't matter," said Father Tierney happily. Then, like he was confiding something. "I'm not from here, either."

"You aren't?" Gansey asked, surprised. That seemed unlikely. The patchwork priest fit this odd countryside, fit it just as well as Otto had. "Where are you from, then?"

"I--" Father Tierney began. He began to look soft and strangely meek again. Gansey realized that he was not very old. He was maybe a little older than they were. Gansey was reminded of Noah, the Noah he'd first met, before he'd known the truth about Noah. 

"I don't know," said Father Tierney. "I--I've forgotten the details. Maybe I'll tell you. But first you tell me. Can you see it?"

He brought his mug up and gestured at his face with it. As he did so, he spread his lips wide to show his teeth, like a child practicing a smile. The patches on his cheeks crinkled. Both the free hand and the hand holding the mug traced the air before his face, following the lines of his scars.

"Can you see me?" Father Tierney asked again. "People can't, generally. But that's people from here. You're not from here. Can you see it, then?"

Gansey could. But Father Tierney inspired a strange mixture of compassion and disgust, and Gansey did not know how to begin telling someone that they did not appear human, they appeared patchwork. Gansey had to be more thoughtful with words than that. He was often so careless with them. And he knew that saying unpleasant things sometimes made them more true, made them inescapable. So he opened his mouth and then closed it very firmly, then rubbed at his lower lip.

"Yes," was all he said. "Yes. I can see you."

"Andwhatdoyousee?" Father Tierney said, so fast that Gansey could hardly parse the words. Gansey blinked at him.

"What do you expect me to see?" he said carefully.

Father Tierney put his coffee mug down and suddenly looked very forlorn. When he began again to steady some papers on his desk, the criss-crossed hands were shaking.

"Nothing, I suppose," he said again. Now his faint accent doubled and Gansey could almost place it. He added, sounding disheartened, "No one else here seems to see it. None of the people here seem to see it either."

Gansey could only assume that was a good thing. Father Tierney did not cut an especially attractive figure. Something about the way he flitted from fabric to flesh to flesh fabric was discomposing. Gansey didn't want to hold it against him, but other people might, and if something about the magic-soaked countryside here affected the people, kept them from seeing the Father as he was, then perhaps that was for the best. 

Though as soon as he thought that, he felt ashamed. It was better to be seen as you really were, as your truest self. But Tierney the patchwork priest couldn't seem to decide what he really was, if he was entirely alien or merely something scarred.

"I can see you," Adam said suddenly. "You look like a crazy quilt to me."

Gansey stared at him. In the faint grey light of the grey stone office, Adam looked very alien and determined. Gansey felt like he'd turned and lost sight of Adam, and in the interim Adam had shot forward in a new direction entirely.

"I'm sorry," Adam said now, voice low.

Gansey could not tell who he was apologizing to.

"But it's true," Adam continued. "To know you're scarred, and have everybody pretend you're not in a loud way. I don't see how that helps. You don't look human to me. You look like a patchwork quilt."

Father Tierney exhaled hard. Then he buried his head in his hands. Gansey shot an alarmed look at Adam. Adam's defiance faded. He began to look appropriately regretful. For some reason, this switch was as disconcerting as Father Tierney's transformation from flesh to fabric had been.

"Thank God," Father Tierney said, after a moment. "Thank God. Oh, thank _God_. I thought I was going insane."

"What?" someone said. It might have been Adam or it might have been Gansey himself. More likely it was both of them.

Father Tierney's face emerged from behind his hands and he looked just scarred now, scarred and otherwise normal. He rested his face in the vee formed by his hands, like a child, and said, "I thought I was insane. Can I tell you something? You're the only other ones. I think there used to be some other people. Real people. Like us. From outside. But I haven't seen them in weeks, maybe. Maybe months. Maybe a year. Part of the trouble is that I can't tell, and most of the time the only one here is me. Can I tell you about that?"

Though it was Adam who'd answered his question, he addressed this primarily to Gansey. 

Bewildered, Gansey gave him a slight nod.

-

Father Tierney was not from this place and he was very certain that he was not even from this country.

He'd been brought here to run the church. The people of the town of Secondborn needed a priest. Firstborn had a priest, and the city of Alter had several and even an archbishop. But Secondborn had had nothing, because Secondborn was the newest of the communities in these valleys. It glistened with newness. It was a bubble of hope and life, but it had no priest. 

So. The Father.

Who was not, he added faintly, entirely sure that he should be a Father. 

In fact, he was fairly sure he'd never even completed seminary. 

In fact, he was fairly sure he'd never even applied to seminary.

He thought he was around eighteen. He was tall for his age, though, and he had a nervous disposition that made him look older than his years. He remembered distinctly that for a long time the only thing that had tended to calm his nerves was church. He remembered haunting St. Mary's, though he couldn't remember now what St. Mary's looked like, and he remembered talking a lot about the priesthood. Priesthood was good. If he ever got around to it, then it would be the priesthood for him, with pristine vestments and the liturgy and the good clean feeling to it all, like God was there waiting on the other side of the door to remind you to scrub behind your ears. It was a sacred calling like that. It was a political stance. It was a job. People used to say he'd be good at it. Or maybe they had. He couldn't quite remember.

The trouble with Father Tierney was not that there were scars on his face, but that there were holes in his memory. 

He could see in the mirror that he was patchwork. Someone had cobbled him together and sewn the pieces into a reasonable facsimile of a person. Father Tierney did not need to see in the mirror to know that they must have forgotten to put in parts of the brain. Specifically, the remembering parts. He had only the slightest recollection of where he'd come from. Terraced houses, short and squat, with paint peeling on the brick. Fire. Grey skies. Evening mass. The stress of walking past a parked van all in a huddle. Morning mass.The muzzle of a rifle at the end of the street. Noon mass. A parade.

It was all a jumble. He could tell that he hadn't been from a happy place, but he'd _been_. 

His clearest and happiest memories were things like the Liturgy of the Word. The Liturgy of the Eucharist. Being selected to read passages. He'd liked that. When you sat in the pew you said less: thanks be to God, and only a little more. If you were asked to be a reader, you got to see the whole parable spread out before you. You got to proclaim it. He'd liked that. He'd felt most himself there, and not just himself but his best self, calm and not anxious. 

This, he thought, must have been why he was brought here. The Bibles here were not right, because pieces of them did not appear. There were simply blank pages for long stretches, as though the printers had become dissatisfied with those parts. Psalms was there in its entirety, and Genesis. Revelations was entirely scrapped. But if Father Tierney read anything out in his calm, smooth, worn-away voice, no one would know the difference. The people of Secondborn went to church because someone seemed to have told them to go long ago and they'd never questioned the mandate. But what church itself contained did not interest them. It was enough to have all the proper features of a church and inside it someone who could run the thing and enjoy it, but if part of the soul of the mass had been ripped away, no one really minded. 

In fact, they didn't notice. Father Tierney could break off in the middle of a sermon and stare at them in silence for an hour, and they would stare back, smiling and handsome, until he started up again. The Father's congregation was dutiful and laughing, wild and young, every one beautiful in a sweet way that gradually grew seductive as they aged. It left the Father uneasy. He was patchwork, but human inside. They seemed like excellent examples of humans, but they weren't. Strangeness leaked out of them, a strangeness they could not contain because whatever it was they might wrap it up in had been discarded some time ago.

They left not money in the collection plate, but blue glass or gemstones. They adored holy water and splashed with themselves with it almost too-liberally. They fought for seats near the baptismal font. They liked nothing more than the idea of transubstantiation; in fact, it fascinated them. For years before coming here it had fascinated Father Tierney. But he couldn't see why it should hold any special appeal for the townsfolk of Secondborn, because everything near Secondborn was a miracle. The Eucharist wafers grew on a tree out back, and so did the vestments. The Communion wine bubbled up from a fountain in the rectory. There was a sprawl of bushes in the Father's garden that sprouted Roman-Rite liturgical books like fat leather-bound strawberries. If in fact Christ entered the wafers and wine, coated them in holiness like a second skin, that was no surprise to Father Tierney. Of course He did. He was like everything else here: miraculous.

The greatest miracle was the town of Secondborn itself. They could go and see it if they liked. In fact, they should. It would be gone soon enough. 

Secondborn was a symmetrical village that had all the storied history and permanence of a campsite. It stood a little further into the woods, on the edge of Harps Valley lake, and it was full of identical white houses with very low eaves. On these eaves there grew vines and creepers and other green things. These chimed whenever residents appeared, and when they chimed the bells on the church would ring in answer and Father Tierney would know it was time for mass.

Long stretches seemed to pass between masses. The Father had tried to count the time out. He'd found that night never really approached, not even once, but in terms of hours it might add up to a stretch of seven days. It made sense to him that he had to wait seven days to start again. The townsfolk of Secondborn were dutiful but not devoted. The Father's garden grew no daily missals for them. Only Sunday missals. They came to mass only on Sundays. Secondborn existed, Father Tierney thought, only on Sundays. Only on the seventh day, mass day.

Whenever he'd gone out to the town between masses, it was entirely empty. Between mass days, the people of Secondborn simply disappeared. Their cool white houses were there, silent and abandoned. Their cool blue lake sparkled with life, fat golden fish jumping joyfully, ducks and large white birds roosting patiently along the edges. But the people were all gone. Father Tierney had tried to follow them once to see where it was they went. He'd been forced to turn away because it had begun to feel like an intrusion. The Secondborn villagers came in solid little clumps of families, beautiful sets. Men with jet black hair like ancient Spanish mariners, women with a fair glacial beauty, small rings of delighted children with wide mouths and button noses. Each family had a small white cave of a house, and they would come out onto their porches with food, drink, welcome. But something about them seemed to suggest that Father Tierney should not stay too long. They were closed units, the Secondborn folk, and they never divulged why or where it was they went. A secret to every family and every family a secret.

This did not eat at Father Tierney as much as it could have, because he had a secret himself. He was patchwork with holes inside, even if the people of Secondborn never noticed it. No, what ate at the Father was that he remembered discussing just this, this business of Secondborn, with someone _else_.

He thought he hadn't always been alone here. In fact, he remembered having a friend.

Father Tierney had come into this strange country with a brother in arms, a companion. He knew this very clearly, because even if he couldn't remember what had come before Secondborn, he could very well remember every instance of his life here once it had begun. The bells and miracle garden and clammy reality of the church had flooded into the holes inside him and filled him up. And he could count back through those memories to the point when he'd first opened his eyes here and found a friend staring down at him, smiling broadly.

At the time, Father Tierney had been thinking of a parade. He knew this. He could remember saying, "What happened to the parade?" He did not know why he'd said it -- just that he had.

The reply had been swift, forceful. An order. "Don't think about the parade. Come on. I've got something to show you. Something to tell you, too."

Don't think about the parade. The moment you were told to ignore the possibility, the more you thought about it. But tthe more Father Tierney dared to think about the parade despite his friend's instructions, the more pieces of his memory seemed to sizzle and burn away. He lost where he came from. He lost his explanation for the patchwork scars, and he lost his first name, and he even lost the name of his friend and he lost almost everything, in fact, but the sense that they had been doing something very big. 

He remembered his first sight of Secondborn, and he remembered how his friend had seemed to produce the entire town from the pocket of his coat. Grand. Excited. Like he'd known it was there. What an adventure, and what meaning, and what significance to it all! All this time, Tierney, and they'd been looking for a place like this. Not a grey anxious place, but cool white and blue and green. Nothing dark or evil. A secret majesty that was for them, all for them, that singled them out and invited them in.

Singled Father Tierney out.

The church had been put here for the Father, so that he could be a priest, like he'd always said he wanted to be. Wasn't that strange? To have such a vague and improbable dream, and to see it answered. When you searched for yourself, your true self, your best self, it wasn't supposed to be so easy. Was it? Perhaps it hadn't been easy. Father Tierney couldn't tell because he couldn't remember what had led him here. He only knew that he hadn't been alone at first. He could remember flashes of a smile and a companionable arm. He could remember real people, a little boy like him with a nervous face and a little boy like his friend: solid memories. So he knew he'd never been like these slippery, beautiful Secondborn people. But instead maybe a real person, the person Father Tierney had been before all the pieces of him had fallen apart and had to be put back together again.

Maybe that was the price. There had to be a price for miracles, the same way you had to have a collection jar at mass. But no one who had never looked for a miracle could understand that. 

Of course, _they_ could understand. They were not like the Secondborn people. They were not here out of duty. They were looking for a miracle, weren't they? Why else would real people come here, if not looking for miracles?

-

The Father's tale had a visible effect on Gansey, if you knew where to look. The fingertips on the lower lip again, the shifting of the broad square shoulders. Gansey's hopes seemed to have been confirmed and it made him quietly delighted, pensive. Strangely honored to have someone finally see him for himself.

"Miracles," he considered, still passing his fingers over his lower lip. He looked more like a king than ever. He elevated the room several degrees. He said, "Have you heard of the legends of sleeping kings? We're looking for one. Glendower. Have you heard of him?"

"No," Father Tierney said. He traced a scar absentmindedly with a finger as he thought it over. "I've forgotten everything. It could be that I did know. If you want to find a king, I think this would be a decent place to look. The people here can be very kingly."

Adam could see Gansey file this away gently in his mind. "Glendower," Gansey continued, "Is underground. Do you know anything about people trapped underground, sleepers underground?"

"No, but you could always ask the town," the Father suggested. 

Gansey considered this. He shot Adam a look as though to ask: was this sound? Adam was still -- still, months after first meeting Gansey -- flattered and ashamed by this. The way Gansey looked to him. 

"We don't know what this village will be like," Adam said noncommittally, trying to see every angle. "Why would they know anything about Glendower?"

"Why would they know?" Gansey echoed. "Why wouldn't they know? We lose nothing by asking."

Lose nothing. A Ganseyism if Adam had ever heard one. Gansey lived with so many lose nothing situations. Adam lived with precious few. It was hard for Adam to really believe in them. It was suddenly exhausting to feel upset about it. The minor arcana had begun to burn again in his pocket, Cabeswater renewing its attempts to contact him. The forest was jittery with nerves and with fear of the unknown, and it wanted Adam to be jittery as well.

Adam did not want to be. They were here. It was done. Gansey was on the trail of his king, but he was not alone. That would have to be enough.

"Remember that he says they're not human," Adam pointed out, pointing at the priest. 

Gansey said, politely, "And you're so cautious with inhuman things?"

As if to punctuate this, the minor arcana began to gently thrum. Cabeswater would not let him be. When Adam took the cards and out and turned them over they were washed of color and pattern, coated in strange writing Adam couldn't immediately identify. 

Gansey raised an eyebrow at it, a magnificent and puzzled gesture.

Adam shook his head. He couldn't explain it. And it was more than he wanted to reveal in front of the Father.

"Let's go, then," he said simply.


	7. Chapter 7

Ronan led the way along the beach. Blue mostly kept up. At several points she would stop and take out her switchblade. She'd upend a shell or two, or examine a fast-moving crab, poke at the small scuttling things in rock pools. Ronan would walk on without her until he heard the soft slap of her shoes on the sand as she hurried to keep up. 

"That's not Gansey, and that's not Adam," he pointed out eventually, when she'd cornered a pair of fish striped like green and white candy canes.

"You're right. Gansey would be an Emperor Angelfish," she said. She straightened and they left the fish behind, but she continued to lag at intervals, curious about everything. She cut herself some sea grass and sniffed it. Pocketed odd rocks. Lifted large golden conch shells to her ears to hear the ocean. Took off her shoes and felt the sand with her toes, like she could learn something about it through feel alone. 

When she discovered a colony of snails with lavender-spotted shells, Ronan gave up and sat down on the sand next to her.

Chainsaw tried to peck at the snails. Blue gently shooed her away. 

"Don't go to the beach much, do you?" Ronan said.

300 Fox Way did not seem like the kind of place where vacations happened. More the kind of place where everyone might decide at any moment to embark on a spirit quest or join a gypsy caravan. But vacations they probably didn't have money for.

"I've been to a _beach_ ," Blue said, annoyed. "I've never been to a beach like this."

"A nice one," Ronan guessed.

"No! One that has made-up creatures in it!" Blue said.

Ronan shrugged. This was a magical place, like Cabeswater. It worked along magical rules. There was no point in stopping to examine every pest that seemed out of place, because they'd all be magical, which didn't make them any less pests. 

"Are you classifying them or something?" he said. "Maggot Darwin?"

"Well, it's not like I'm ever going to get a chance to see what Darwin saw," Blue said. "I might as well enjoy this while I have it."

She had a point. Ronan wouldn't make it bigger than it already was. Instead, he squinted up at the sun overhead, trying to measure the time even though Calla had as good as told them this would be useless here. He thought of Adam and Gansey with a bloodhound urge, overpowering. His to find and take home. 

"We should go inland," Blue said. She looked a little wistful at the thought of leaving the shore behind, but she added, "We're not getting anywhere just hanging out on the beach."

Ronan agreed. He stood and headed inland. Apparently he'd been here before, but he didn't really know where here was or what the dimensions of it looked like. He assumed it would unravel the way dreams and Cabeswater did, with the pieces truly falling into place only after they'd given themselves over to the landscape. 

The beach became a green slope and the slope became a copse of trees that Blue insisted on examining for a few minutes. These trees seemed to grow the huge golden shells she'd found on the beach. Ronan was already looking past them. 

Just beyond the trees, there was a highway.

Ronan climbed over the low rail separating it from the shell trees. It was level country here and the highway was perfectly straight and empty in both directions. They could see along it for miles. Ronan quickly located a road sign in one direction. Blue pointed out another, in the other direction. There was a moment of silent mutual challenge. Your sign or mine? The stupidity of this occurred to both of them almost right away. Ronan went to see his. Blue went to hers. Blue's was closer, so she circled back to Ronan just as he reached his sign.

"It has all kinds of made-up places!" she reported breathlessly. "Hiland, Loland. The Unknown, whatever that is. Obviously something you can't know, which makes me wonder why you'd even put it on a sign."

Ronan grinned. His sign said:

**SPEED LIMIT**

And then under that, in larger letters,

**FUCK IT.**

"Well, that doesn't seem dangerous at all," Blue said. 

Ronan said, "We need a car."

Or two. The endless road was a gift. Speed limit? Fuck it. His soul laid out in asphalt. 

Without thinking, he climbed back over the low railing and stretched out under the shell trees, on grass that felt strangely furry under his skin. 

"Oookay," Blue said. 

"Listen, I don't chatter when you're working," Ronan told her, closing his eyes.

"Uh, yeah you do," Blue said. "When you see me at Nino's all you do is bitch." She lowered her voice dramatically. "Mushroom and pineapple, maggot. Mushroom and pineapple. Seriously. That's disgusting."

Chainsaw gave a _kraa_ of support, either because she hated it when Ronan ordered that or because Blue's mimicry wasn't half bad.

"Shush," Ronan told Chainsaw.

"No, I don't think I will," Blue told him. He felt her settle next to him on the grass. "Can you dream on command now? Is this from your lessons with Adam?" She still sounded disgruntled about the lessons. 

"We didn't invite you," Ronan said plainly, eyes still closed, "Because you had no business being there."

"Oh no. No. Of course not. You were doing something magical and I amplify magic. What's the point of bringing me along?" Blue said testily.

"This is the kind of magic you'd ruin," Ronan said. 

He realized too late that this was the truth shaved down to unrecognizable fraction. She wouldn't ruin anything. Maybe she already had. And now she had Gansey. It struck Ronan as somehow disloyal. Blue belonged to the universe of women who were like that. Which was to say: not Aurora. Not dream things. Not _not_ women.

"I don't ruin magic -- I enhance it," Blue continued. "But I bet neither of you thought about that."

Adam had. He'd never said so, but Ronan didn't know of any universe in which Adam Parrish, careful and scientific, wouldn't have hit on that exact thought. They were trying to make Ronan's powers more extraordinary than normal. That was Blue. Blue did that. 

Adam had drawn a circle around the idea carefully, noting that sometimes it seemed the line itself could only give them so much power, that the problem really wasn't that Cabeswater was unwilling to be poured out beyond its boundaries, that to make two genuine independent human _souls_ for Matthew and Aurora --

Well. 

For that you might need something more. Another element. A person with some strange, unpredictable alchemy. Besides Ronan. 

Blue, said the space in the conversation.

But Adam had let the space sit. He'd known, Ronan thought suddenly. He'd _known_. Ronan's nighttime dreaming sessions weren't just about Ronan's powers, and they weren't just about Matthew and Aurora. And Adam had known that, of course he had. Ronan had known he had. 

But to feel it in his bloodstream while it was happening, with Adam sitting there a mattress and several universes away -- to feel that then was not to know it now. It was humiliating now. Adam had known why they could not invite Blue. Adam had felt it. Adam, who was deliberate and disdainful and pursued Aglionby, pursued the Ley Line, pursued _growth_ \-- had known how Ronan felt. 

And yet had not pursued Ronan.

Instead he'd asked Ronan to turn his powers inward, not to dream reality, but to un-dream it. A thing that felt wrong, felt like heavy, perverse. Did it look like perversion, to Adam? Did _Ronan_ look perverse?

"Admit it," Blue was saying, irritated. "You never even thought of inviting me. If you'd have invited anyone to help, it would have been Gansey or Noah, even though they're no--"

"I like him!"

It came out harsh. Humiliated. Ronan had never wanted to say it like that. He'd never wanted to have to say it. Somehow it had been forced out of him, a truth to try and cleanse the heavy ugliness settling over him.

Blue said, "You like them, but not me! Fine. It's about time you admitted it. Yo--"

She kept saying things. Ronan did not hear them. It took him a few moments to piece together that he had told her the absolute truth, ruining it in the process, and she seemed not to have heard him at all. 

"Not _them_ ," he snapped, opening his eyes and storming up from the ground. " _Him_. I like _him_."

Maybe he had only said it to face it, to make sure it was not perversion. But it did sound that way. How could he make it sound so ugly? It was fine for other things to come out ugly, it was preferred. But not this. 

It was so large inside Ronan and yet it had come out so small.

A few moments ago Ronan had wanted a car. Now he wanted a car on fire. He wanted a wreck, he wanted something that looked the way he felt. He wanted to take off down the road until he found another driver, and he wanted it to be not another boy but a living knife. He wanted to dig his nails along the lines on his palm until they bled. 

"Ronan?" Blue said. Ronan didn't see her. He'd turned away. He saw the stupid shell trees, the distant grass and more distant beach. He started for it blindly, biting at the rubber on his wrists. He couldn't go to sleep with her there and if he couldn't sleep he couldn't make it real and if he couldn't make it real he couldn't burn properly. And he wanted to. 

He knew now that if he ever told Adam it would come out ugly. Was Adam expecting him to tell? To say it? Ronan shouldn't have to say it. He had said it. It was just that it couldn't come out wrong if you said it without words.

But maybe Adam had known it would be wrong in Ronan's mouth. Maybe it was wrong to Adam no matter what.

"Ronan!" Blue said. She sounded alarmed. He was alarming. He did not particularly care just then if he abandoned Blue Sargent in the middle of nowhere, for example. He trusted her to follow anyway, still upset about not being invited. But Ronan had never been excluded from anything and didn't see why he should care simply because Blue had made it her number one pet peeve. 

"Alright, asshole," Blue said. She was able to wrench him around with surprising strength until he was again facing the highway.

There was a burning car on the highway. 

It looked exactly the way Ronan had thought it would. Ronan hadn't needed to go to sleep to make it real, this spectacular burn. It deserved several grinning ringmasters in sunglasses. Sparks went up around them and caught on the beautiful shell trees and hit the golden shells with a hot sizzle. Gold burned and pooled on the ground at the roots. Ronan stared.

It was a BMW but he thought offhandedly, very clearly, that it should be a Mitsubishi.

It became a Mitsubishi.

"Stop it," Blue said. "Ronan, stop it."

The grove of shell trees was dying now. The trees were catching sparks from volcano car on the highway. Green paradise gone to shit. 

" _Stop it_ ," Blue said again.

When Ronan didn't respond quickly enough, she shoved him with all her force. He stumbled, surprised. Blue seemed briefly surprised that she'd done it, but then she stepped down on her shock with all her might and replaced it with fury. She knew perfectly well it was Ronan that was doing this, because why wouldn't she know? They both knew.

"Put it out!" Blue commanded. "You're destroying everything!"

Ronan had never before considered that she might a real match for Gansey. It wasn't a topic he was interested in. But now when she spoke she was so clear and unrelenting that she seemed every bit Gansey's equal. Gansey on fire, the uncontrollable and powerful Gansey, and yet here was Blue to tell the fire to go fuck itself. Blinking, Ronan thought of putting it out.

It went out. The Mitsubishi smoked faintly. The sparks in the trees continued to burn and Blue approached one with dismay, reaching for the nearest shell as though to rescue it. She was going to burn herself, Ronan realized.

He closed his eyes and told himself that the trees were no longer burning. Clearly. He had to make it clear, make it real. Truth behind the words. It was true; the trees were no longer burning when he opened his eyes. Blue's fingers closed around a shell and Ronan knew without being told that it would be cool to the touch. 

"They play music," Blue told him furiously, holding the shell up to her ear as though to check that it still worked right. "They play fiddles and -- and reed pipes, and there are voices singing more beautifully than anything, and you set them on fire--"

"I put them out, too," Ronan said quietly.

He breathed in and out, hard. Picked at the bands on his wrists. He was not feeling shame, just blank clarity. He did not want a Mitsubishi. The original plan had been two cars, and not Mitsubishis. 

Normally he would need a real dream to do it, but here he didn't. How stupid to forget. This place was like Cabeswater: not just magic, but a dream. Here he needed nothing more than himself.

And maybe, he thought, maybe Blue Sargent. Maybe she was helping somehow. He closed his eyes.

"Oh no," Blue said. "You come here and act like you don't even care even though it's so beautiful, and it's magic, and then you _destroy_ it--"

Ronan opened his eyes. 

"Look," he said. 

His BMW was on the highway, whole and not burning and exactly as Ronan expected it to look. Perfectly recreated. And then next to it there was the other car he could do as easily as breathing, a marvelous orange offense.

"You can have the Camaro," he told Blue. He took a moment leaning against the highway rail to dream the keys. In his head. In real life. It was all the same here. 

Blue spent that moment furiously stomping around the trees to check that they were all out, and then furiously stomping around the cars to see if they were as real as they looked, and in general just furious. Ronan heard several times that she thought he was an asshole, and she thought right.

"Do you want to race?" he said, after a moment. He didn't look at her but instead at the shell trees, at the roots coated in molten gold. He could remove it, make it like it never happened. It had happened. He'd done that. He left it alone. 

"No, I don't want to race," Blue said. "I want to make you see _red_."

Right. So race. Ronan tossed her the keys to the Camaro. She looked like she wanted to throw them back in his face. 

Ronan could feel around in his mouth to see if there was an apology there. But there wouldn't be. Offering her the Camaro -- that was it. He felt clear and a little sick, like he was recovering from something. Adam. Not quite Adam. Adam pulsed and hurt inside him, too beautiful and too removed, something he couldn't have in the real world and maybe couldn't even have here, even though he was different here. He could make things real without dreams. But his truest dream choked and came out ugly. 

He didn't want to burn anymore, but he did want to get dreamt BMW and follow the highway until it didn't exist anymore, none of it. 

Blue stopped before the driver-side door of the Camaro and said, tone still chilly, "So are you gay?"

"Yeah," Ronan said. 

"Okay," she said. She seemed to be making an effort to be kind about it, but Ronan could see her give up and revert to honesty instead. "You didn't have to be a jerk about it. I don't even care," she snapped, and got in the car.

-

Father Tierney decided to take them down to the village himself. He seemed eager to leave the church, explaining almost shamefacedly that he could spend what felt to be hours or possibly weeks there, in the same cold stone rooms, and not notice until he met people from the outside. Which he hardly ever did. Not until them, this marvelous pair. He really did look at them like they were something special. 

Gansey in particular. Adam he seemed to look at only to have his gaze slide away, as though he'd seen something he couldn't quite put words to.

When Adam tried to ask the minor arcana about this, every card he flipped to showed new words in new languages. It was like Cabeswater had forgotten how to communicate with him and was cycling desperately through every tool it had.

 _It's me,_ Adam thought hard, rubbing at the cards. _The Magician. Your eyes. Show me what you see._

It was no use. The cards kept rewriting themselves, dancing with magic, sometimes issuing sounds Adam half-thought he could hear in both ears. Confused conduits for whatever magic Cabeswater could force through into this place. 

It was a place already clogged with magic. This was a clumsy way to think of it, but it was the only way Adam knew to describe the grove between the forest and the town of Secondborn. Clogged. The Father led them down a winding path with trees growing so thick on either side that at times they formed a wall of reddish wood. Mushrooms with silver and blue caps grew in clumps and let out soft sighs whenever Adam or Gansey brushed by. Everything was alive and present. Even the loam under their feet shifted like a living thing. Gansey spent several minutes examining it, lifting first one Top Sider and then the other and watching the ground roll beneath him in answer. He looked back at Adam as he did so only to find Adam rubbing at his cards.

"What is it?" Gansey said. "Adam, what is it? Let me see."

He reached for the cards. Adam let him take them. Father Tierney was already several feet ahead of them both, but Gansey let the priest walk on. He turned the cards over and said, "Should they be doing that?"

"No," Adam said. "I don't know. I think Cabeswater wants to talk to me, but it's panicking for some reason." A thought occurred to him. "If we had Ronan's puzzle box, we might be able to figure it out." 

That was a useless thought. Not only did they not have the puzzle box, they did not have _Ronan_. Months ago, Adam would have felt some relief at this rare moment. Gansey and magic and the quest -- with no ever-present Ronan Lynch scowling in the rear. But now he did not feel relief. 

"He should be here," Gansey said, frowning and passing the cards back. "So should Jane."

"And Noah," Adam echoed.

"And Noah," Gansey said. A shadow passed over his features, brief but present. Gansey did not like having any of the others gone.

Ahead, Father Tierney called for them. They continued down the path and came to a fork in the road. Here it was suddenly very cold. The Father called again and they followed his voice down a path bordered by frozen flower buds, wearing their ice shells like armor. When Adam stepped on one by accident it let out a protesting shrieks like an offended cat. Adam winced, thinking of Persephone's admonitions against hurting living things. 

But soon enough they caught up with the Father at the edge of the forest, and there lay the town. 

The houses were laid out in identical rows, their eaves hanging low and draped with flowers. There were children playing outside, small and perfectly-formed and in their Sunday best. Women spoke in hushed voices from the inside. At nearly every door there stood a watchful man. Some played music or carved things. 

It felt like a historical village, Jamestown or Roanoke. Reenactors. Something about the people here felt like they were playacting. Adam still had the sense that they'd taken their skin off, but now this came coupled with the sense that maybe their skin was what mattered. Their outsides were missing, but if they were to shrug them on then Adam would see them for what they were. He understood this because his father was like that. Topsy-Turvy. A man in reverse, a man who was his anger, but the anger was a thing he took on and off, and so the truth of him wasn't anywhere inside, and in fact Adam had stopped looking for it a long time ago.

"Adam?" Gansey said now, laying a hand on his shoulder.

Adam snapped to attention. All his thoughts tumbled to a heap at his feet and he saw them for what they were: confusion. He blinked. He couldn't explain himself. But then the cards in his pockets thumped. Adam felt them hot against the fabric, hot enough to reach his skin, a heat that snaked over him with tendrils of barest feeling. 

Of course. This was not himself but Cabeswater, Cabeswater finally reaching him and filling him with visions, showing him truth. Only it was not always a truth Adam could understand. It was not always a truth for the current moment. The forest had no context to offer him. It only wanted him to see what it saw.

Briefly, testingly, he gave in to the cards and their pull. For a moment. For a moment, the village was full of blubbery balls of fur, black button eyes. 

"Adam," Gansey said again, loud and very firm. 

And the vision left him. The tendrils of heat dissipated, the warmth of the cards retreating. Something about the power and concern in Gansey's voice had chased it away. 

Adam felt both irritated and strangely soft. Proud, to have a friend like this. Gansey's hand was still on his shoulder, firm and warm and alive, and Adam realized that Gansey must have touched him three or four times today and he hadn't even noticed. He sidestepped the touch now, ducked out from under Gansey's arm. Refused to look at Gansey's face when he did this. He wanted to get back to the visions, those glimpses of the truth. This was no time for vulnerability. 

Adam loved Gansey for having it, but this was no time for it. 

He told Gansey, "I'm fine," but before they could say anything more two of the men from the town approached. 

"Your friend alright?" one of them asked Gansey. 

"What do you know about sleeping kings?" Gansey asked instead of answering. It was his usual question, but it was not said in the usual way. It came out too even, like Gansey was reciting it to deflect attention away from Adam. Gansey being protective, as protective as Cabeswater could be. Again his hand found Adam's shoulder, and Adam thought of words like _control_ and _pity_. He thought that maybe he could step away again. 

He made himself stay. He would not confuse what was happening. This was not control. It was not pity. Gansey was a friend.

"Specifically one underground king," Gansey was saying. "Glendower. Have you heard of him?"

The two men looked at each other. One said, "We-ell." It was an elongated bark, uneasy. 

"The only place around here with a king is Alter," said the man continued, after a moment. "Alter picked up a king some time ago, and he's always asleep."

"What do you mean?" Gansey asked. And _there_ he sounded more like himself when he spoke of Glendower. Impassioned. In his excitement, his hand dropped away from Adam's shoulder. Adam felt strangely bereft. 

"Can't say we know for sure," was the barking answer from the second man. "We never go there. It's lawless there. No respect for the creator. Dreaming kings."

"Dreaming kings!" echoed the first man glumly. 

"I think it's marvelous," Gansey said. 

"Well, it shows what you know," said the second man, somehow unaffected by Gansey's obvious delight. He added, sounding disgruntled, "If you want see something as marvelous as all that, why are you here? Make the road take you to Alter, then."

Gansey's handsome face was briefly marred by annoyance. He said, "We can't make that road do anything. Doesn't it just go there?"

"Not when it doesn't want to," said the first man, sounding somewhat more understanding than the second. "You might want to take the train from Harps Valley Junction."

"Well, where can we catch the train?" Gansey asked. 

"Other side of the lake," said the first man. Then he grinned, and his understanding dropped away. "Of course, you'll have to get the road to take you there too!"

Gansey's jaw worked itself. Controlled fury. Now Adam grasped him. He instinctively believed that Gansey would pull away, but Gansey didn't. Gansey let Adam put his hand on his arm and keep it there. It felt wondrous, true in a way that these the town of Secondborn somehow was not.

Then Adam blinked, and he was not in Secondborn at all, but beneath a lake. The minor arcana burned in his pocket. 

"There might be another way," Father Tierney said now, wading into the conversation. "Come on, Finn. You know there might be another way."

"I don't," said the first man stoutly. "I don't hand out ways to get to Alter."

"I heard it's a wonderful place," Gansey said. Now his voice was cold. He leaned into Adam in a regal sort of way. Adam, chased out of the Cabeswater vision by this, let him. "We were told one can do anything there. Big city, is it?"

Finn ignored his question. "Why would you want to be able to do anything?" he said irritably. "Give a man a chance to do anything and he'll do -- well. Anything."

"People have no business doing anything. Not people around here," said the second man. 

"The trouble with Alter is that once they got that king it was like wishes answered, and now they do think they can do anything," said Finn. 

"Wishes answered?" Gansey said. He straightened, sounding as unhappy and shocked as Adam felt. "So someone woke him up?"

It seemed impossible. Surely they -- _Gansey_ \-- would have known. Gansey had been searching for so long. To have someone wake Glendower before them felt like a cheat. 

And Adam was pinning Gansey's salvation on Glendower. For better or for worse.

But Finn only said, darkly, "Who wakes him up, the lazy bones? He's still sleeping, if I know him."

"No honest work out of that one. He's never made a thing in his life," said the second man.

"Mannix, _you_ don't make anything," said Father Tierney in a pained voice. "And I've never seen you work."

"'Course, but I'm not a king," Mannix insisted. "It's not my job to make things. It's not my job to work."

Father Tierney frowned and shook his head.

"Come on," he told Gansey and Adam. "They're always like that. But there might be another way to get to the train. How difficult is the road here, if I might ask?"

As the father led them down a grassy side street, Gansey described the intractable road, and then, as the Father asked more questions, moved on to the garden of cars and everything else that had happened in the past few hours. Hours? It annoyed Adam to discover that he, like Father Tierney, had no real sense of how time passed here. It was a frightening, disorienting feeling. Adam reached again for Cabeswater to center himself, brushing his fingertips over the cards in his pocket. 

Again, the playful blubbery shapes, like great furry slugs. There and then gone. Again the image of the lake bed. Again Cabeswater's truth, laid over the scene with dogged insistence. 

Gansey, still in conversation with Father Tierney, had to take his elbow again and prompt him to get him to move. He cast Adam a sharp look as he did this. Adam let him. He found that he could call and reject the visions at will if only his fingers were closed on the cards. He could make them sharpen, make them almost seem sensible. He nearly _knew_.

He scarcely noticed that Father Tierney had led them to the lake. 

The water was dark and endless. They couldn't see the shore on the other side, only some mountains so distant that they too seemed impossible, pasted on. The Father gathered up his robes and skirted past some children playing on the shore, rolling around in what looked like a mountain of furry sleeping bags. These had been laid out along the beach at intervals as far as the eye could see, as though the town were preparing for an evening of camping.

Adam stared. Finn and Mannix had trailed them warily, and were watching them from the town site. Their gazes flitting to the children in their furry playground on the shore. Still Adam stared. He knew it would make him seem dirty and dangerous and he didn't care. He was dirty, trailer-made. And he was dangerous, if not in the way they thought. Dreaming lies and undreaming. That had its own ugly danger. Again, he grasped the cards. 

This time, they showed him nothing. 

He'd thought they might. There was nothing to they needed show. Adam knew. He knew, looking at the scene on the shore.

"Adam!" Gansey shouted, beckoning him over to some rocks by the shore.

Adam went, but he barely spared a glance for what Gansey and the Father were discussing. It looked like great shells, large as rafts, that had drifted in and become trapped along the rocks. Gansey and the Father had already climbed out to the furthest, largest rock, surrounded by deep black water. They seemed to be trying to reel one in. Adam ignored this as he climbed to join them. He took out his deck. Shuffled. The heirophant. Good. He'd use this one. He'd give the rest to Gansey. Gansey needed them more -- Adam should have given him all the talismans to begin with -- and Gansey would certainly need them if this didn't work.

But, Adam thought recklessly, this was going to work. He put the heirophant in the inner pocket of his jacket, the pocket that zipped. Then he calmly palmed the rest off to Gansey, ignored his friend's startled glance.

 _I found the truth_ , Adam told the minor arcana, thumbing the heirophant through the fabric. _I found what you wanted me to find. I know what they_ are.

And again, Cabeswater showed him the town deluged with water, the town as though it were resting at the bottom of the lake. These days, Cabeswater's instructions could be very clear. Or maybe Adam was just getting better at reading them.

"Do you trust me?" he asked Gansey. Gansey stared at him, bewildered. Adam repeated the question. 

"Yes," Gansey began. He looked like he would qualify it. Adam did not want him to. He touched Gansey's wrist briefly, warm and alive.

Then he jumped into the lake. 

He couldn't actually swim. He'd never learned. He'd wanted to, the summer he'd turned eleven, but at eleven he'd had no working papers. And the lessons had cost an amount he'd known it would be useless to ask his parents for. So now he sank, and when he reached the bottom he opened his eyes and inhaled.

He half-expected to feel the pressure of drowning. It didn't come. The heirophant card burned cheerfully against his skin, Cabeswater's magic somehow making water feel and operate like air. It was so dark down here that Adam could only see a few feet in front of him, but he seemed to be standing on a shell-cobbled path bordered by tall stone plinths. He supposed he was lucky not to have impaled himself on them, but then maybe that was Cabeswater too. 

When he turned, he could see the path arcing upwards, towards the shore where Gansey was. He felt faintly guilty. 

But he had his task from Cabeswater. To find what was true, real. Real had meaning. Adam could trust real. He knew far too much about unreal not to trust hard truth instead. 

He started down the underwater path. 

Somehow, for some reason he couldn't fully understand, he remembered the first moment he'd stepped into Aglionby. His stomach had been knotted with tension, but when the dean showed him around the marble fireplace dining hall, the enormous glass-ceilinged library, the classrooms with their smartboards and swivel chairs and views of the pristine lake, it had been--

Vibrant. Like this: another world. Adam's world was dust and grease, garbage along the front of the double-wide and in the gutters, dissected and abandoned grey cars along the road. Ugly. Next to that, for an instant, Aglionby had seemed miraculous, just like this place. 

But Adam's first few months at Aglionby had been miserable. The teachers had no time for Adam, the students had so much money that even innocuous comments about what they might buy and where they might go had stung. He had realized that he seemed to be looking at Aglionby through a great barred gate even when he was in it. He did not belong there. It was another world to him, one he thought, in his darkest moments, that he might be better off leaving. But he didn't leave. He didn't leave, not even when he realized that all the golden wonder of Aglionby was soaked in a wonderful carelessness bordering on cruelty. Every boy, especially the handsomest, wealthiest ones like Ronan and Gansey, seemed to look at Adam and see him for what he was. And yet look through him at the same time. Like he didn't exist. Like he wasn't worth existing. 

It was an unreal and horrible way to live, and yet it felt about right, and Adam had expected it to continue indefinitely. 

Until Gansey had befriended him, and the world had seemed real again. Adam had seemed real. Not someone to be looked through, like he was empty all the way down, but someone real the way magic was, or should be, like he was finally where he ought to be, doing what he ought to be doing. Standing with Gansey gave Adam an overpowering sense of rightness. Gansey had that rightness in him, and Adam had longed to be his equal in that way. But he didn't think he ever could be, not really. That was Gansey's. 

Make way for the raven king.

Adam was no king. He was not a creature of gold and miracles. He was dust and dirt. He needed reality. He trusted reality. And Cabeswater, in its own way, always offered him that. Cabeswater had not yet steered him wrong. Adam was beginning to trust in it. How freakish, how like Adam Parrish, to trust not in people but in a controlling forest. But trust it he did, as much as he could.

So he took the path beneath the lake. Luminous jellyfish floated in through the spaces between the plinths, lighting, for an instant, the space beyond. There were great willowy underwater trees out there, only instead of leaves they seemed to grow strands of seaweed. There were oyster shells as big as houses. Large things that scuttled. Nothing came onto the path, but Adam touched the spot on his jacket where the heirophant lurked, just in case. The card seemed to have cooled down, probably because the water itself was cold.

He walked for maybe twenty minutes before the path began to slope upwards instead of down. Now the plinths became more widely-spaced, and he could see more of the strange grasses and trees that grew on the bottom of the lake, an echo of the world above. Glow-worms and strange fluorescent beetles lit the way here, roosting on the rocks or crawling patiently through the sand. By their faint light, he began to see something rising up in the distance. 

After about forty minutes he came close enough to realize that it was a network of caves. Caves built atop eachother, stretching from the bottom of the lake to the surface. 

When Adam climbed into the lowest one, he could see piles of small bones set just outside on a ledge. Glow worms lit the interior and inside everything was cool and somehow strangely cozy. The floor was littered with blue stones and pearls. There was a pattern of shells arranged on the wall to make the shape of a fish. Soft lake grass cushioned the floor. 

He climbed higher.

The caves above had pearls and glittering gems everywhere. Coral growing in colorful patterns along the walls. Plump fish trapped behind bars of glittering blue glass. The higher the caves, the more luxurious. Wasn't it like that everywhere? It was certainly like that here in Secondborn. Because this -- _this_ \-- was the town. The real town.

It took close to an hour to reach the top tier of caves. A large overhanging rock shelf covered them, like the cave structure held up a small island of some sort. It blocked out any light, but here everything was luminescent anyway. Pearl didn't litter the floors; it was carved to form the cave walls. Large, beautiful eels reclined behind the blue glass bars this time, emitting brilliant colorful light. Adam found it easier to explore the deeper recesses of this cave, because there was so much light everywhere: caged fish that emitted pulsing light, ornate glowing scales arranged like murals on the walls. 

In the last room of the last cave, there was a hand mirror.

It was somehow the most surprising thing there. Ordinary and human, and if the people of Secondborn were not human then why would they need it? But they'd taken it to their town and buried it deep in the final cave. It felt like it had meaning. It felt real. He knew that if he picked it up he would see something real in it.

That did happen. 

Something else happened too. Water flooded into him, into his mouth and eyes and nostrils and lungs. Water-water, behaving the way water should. It took Adam off-balance, and he fumbled and choked with the pressure. The mirror dropped from his hands. He blinked and choked, saw white hair and black eyes. He thought of Persephone, and his mind went blank.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I should really warn for insects. I am warning for insects. 
> 
> Also, this chapter is somewhat seasonally appropriate. That is completely unintentional. Still, Happy Halloween!

Gansey did trust Adam. Adam was everything he trusted in. Hard work, careful words, intelligence. And above all truth. Real truth. A boy who could not help but be quietly, defiantly himself. That was Adam, and Gansey trusted that.

But right now he did not trust Cabeswater.

These days, It was hard to tell where Cabeswater ended and Adam began. Adam had handed him those magnificent, talismanic cards before jumping into the lake. A part of Gansey now wanted to throw them in after him.

It would not have helped. Instead he watched as Finn and Mannix and several of the village women raced to the shore, tossed on their furs, and became--

"Oh," he said.

"Yes," Father Tierney said, pausing in his attempts to wrangle the great pearly shell that he'd been showing off before. He sounded uncomfortable. 

He was not as uncomfortable as Gansey could make him. Gansey suddenly felt a kinship with Ronan. He despised an out-an-out liar. Perhaps the priest was not quite a liar, but he hadn't told the whole truth either.

"Did you know, Tierney?" he asked the priest. "About them?"

"I assumed, but I never confirmed it," the Father admitted. He watched impassively as more townsfolk followed Adam into the lake. Gansey was already stripping off his shoes, his shirt. 

"Will they hurt him?" he demanded. 

"No!" Father Tierney said hurriedly. "My God, no. No. They're not like that. You must see -- they're not like people. They don't _hurt_."

"Let's hope they don't," Gansey said. He shrugged off his slacks, like this was the cabin where the crew team changed. He knew he should feel mortified but instead he was determined. Worried. He didn't know if Adam could swim. When he counted out the cards Adam had given him, he came up one short, so even if Adam couldn't swim he would presumably be protected, but how? That was the question. Was it protection if Cabeswater was warping him at the same time, making him erratic?

Was it Cabeswater that was doing it at all? 

Adam hadn't needed Cabeswater to make him take the Camaro. Adam had done that on his own. Gansey told himself that the betrayal no longer stung, and it didn't, but the thought of Adam a stranger all this time did.

"I don't think you need to rescue him from them," Father Tierney said, eyeing the shameless expanse of Gansey before him now. "They're not going after him. I think they're just looking to see what he'll do."

He was right. Gansey realized that he could make them out. Agile, loop-the-looping shapes in the water. They darted to the surface and back under again, touching whiskers, as though they were reporting on Adam's progress. One came to shore on the rocks where he and the Father stood. It shook itself like a dog. Then then shook off _all_ of itself, the furry skin peeling off easily. It was Mannix, even more bare than Gansey and far hairier. Somehow his nakedness made Gansey feel supremely impolite, the way someone cursing at a dull dinner party could make you feel ashamed for not wanting to be there yourself.

He was down to his boxers. And there was a priest right there. And somehow this was the worst moment of the afternoon, because Adam had just jumped into a lake.

Adam himself therefore made it somewhat difficult to be affronted when Mannix said, "What is he? Your boy?"

Gansey was nonetheless affronted on Adam's behalf. 

"Not mine," Gansey said. Did this sting? It should not sting. 

He added, "I suspect he thinks he'll find something under there. Will he?"

"Might," Mannix said. "But what is he?"

"A person," Gansey said shortly. "My friend."

Mannix stared at him. It was as though he knew what Gansey knew: this definition scarcely covered the whole of Adam these days. It never had. It never had. How arrogant was Gansey, to think that he could have the whole of Adam? The whole of any of them? They were all inexplicable in their own ways. Ronan had been wild and secretive for a long time, revealing the full truth of himself only recently. Noah was a puzzle, and fast-fading. And Blue --

He had fought with Blue. It came back to him now. He'd been no gentleman with her, and that was perhaps alright. Strong, strange, splendid Blue did not want a gentleman. But she deserved something better than what he'd given her.

He closed his eyes and wished he could call her. Adam had left him alone. But if he could hear Blue's voice, then even that would not hurt.

"What more is he?" Mannix asked now, this time making the question into a bark.

"I suppose time will tell," Gansey said. Not an answer he was satisfied with, himself. But it was the only answer he could give.

"I sensed it as well," Father Tierney said suddenly. "He's--he feels foreign."

"Well, he's not. He's from Henrietta," Gansey said, annoyed.

"And what is Henrietta?" the Father asked, as though this were a perfectly logical question.

Before Gansey could point out that it was somewhat extraordinary to not know the name of a local township, which was in fact one of the older settlements in Virginia, and certainly one of the more remarkable, Mannix spoke up. He was still on the subject of Adam. 

"Your boy is something more than what he should be," growled the hypocritical Mannix.

Father Tierney rushed in, as though trying to make this less perplexing, less rude. He said, "I've read about a secret sense. Spiritual. A pall of sanctity--" 

"That stinking perfume he has in him is no sanctity," Mannix said. "The wood. Dying lilies. Earth. Something alive in the trees, something the creator didn't make. Something _different_."

Something in Gansey wavered. 

"What do you mean -- different?" he asked quietly, pushing down on the wavering, exterminating it utterly. "What's wrong with different?"

"I suppose Henrietta is different!" Mannix spat.

"Is Henrietta a very new place?" Father Tierney asked, somewhat tentatively. 

"No!" Gansey said. He could not pull apart the threads of this conversation. He felt as though there were a truth here, and truth was good, but perhaps this was a truth he did not want. "It's certainly no newer than this valley!"

"Oh, this valley isn't new," Mannix said dismissively. "It's only been awake for a very long time."

Gansey said, "What do you mean--" but Mannix spoke right over him.

"What I want to know," he said stubbornly, "Is what about the new smell of that boy? Is he something the Alter-folk invented?"

Gansey stared at him.

The Father said, rather hastily, "It's not as if that's bad! Whatever it is in him. It's. I guess it's a bit of an autumn sense, really. A wrong thing for a boy. Like he's not a boy, but maybe a forest." He looked defeated. "I don't know if I'm making sense."

Gansey looked between them, aghast. "You can smell it?" he said. "The forest?"

"We can smell it," Mannix said darkly. "You can't fool _our_ noses."

"I'm not from here, myself. I can only smell the usual things," Father Tierney said. "But I can see that, with your friend, something more than himself looks out of his eyes."

Here it was. The truth. Adam had bargained with the tool of his own haunting. 

Now Gansey brought up one warning hand. It cast a shadow that fell across Mannix's face and made him step back. "Don't," Gansey began. Don't what? They could see it in Adam, just what Gansey most feared. They could _smell_ it. So don't what? What a useless way to begin a sentence, when he didn't know how to end it. They'd told him the truth, and that was what he'd wanted.

He settled on, "Don't hurt him, and don't go near him, none of you," addressing Mannix more than the priest. 

He was expecting some kind of fight, but Mannix took to the command surprisingly well. He nodded, like this was a reasonable request, and stepped back to his skins. 

"Wait," Gansey said. "One more thing. I want you to take me to him."

He gestured at the oversized shell, garish as a stage prop, large as a rowboat. It occurred to him that he needed oars of some kind. He would not turn his nose up at a pearl-shell chariot, but a pearl-shell chariot pulled by rude selkies seemed somehow undignified. He was briefly irritated by this. Magic had found him, but it was not behaving as solemnly as he'd hoped. If magic were an academic department at Aglionby, he'd be right now placing a complaint with the dean.

"Lead me to him," he amended. Then, to the Father, "I need oars."

He felt certain that if he needed oars, then he would have them. Wasn't Cabeswater like that? When they'd wanted to find the cave of a sleeping king, Cabeswater had at least produced a cave. When Blue had looked at him and he'd thought of blue lilies, there had been a rainfall of petals to match his mood. Perhaps one could not command magic entirely, but Gansey felt ready to try and command it a little.

"I have something that could work," Father Tierney told him, and began climbing across the rocks as quickly as his robes would allow. Mannix, for his part, darted back into his skin -- a curiously disgusting process, like watching a wet bear both hug and swallow a man -- and back into the water, where he went to spread Gansey's instructions among the other selkies.

Gansey watched this, still unsettled. It was not simply losing Adam to the lake that bothered him. He was pricked by a deeper, colder fury. He knew that if he'd had some warning, if he'd been able to speak to Adam, been able to say, for example, something perfectly sensible and not at all careless, something like, "Please do not jump into a lake," then--

Adam would not have listened. 

What good was he to Adam if Adam never listened? What good was he to any of them? He was not jealous that they were all remarkable: the ghost, the Greywaren, the magician, and Jane. But they slipped away. Blue with her curse, Noah with his constant decay, Ronan with his secrets, and now Adam. Now and always Adam. His own man.

_And if I rowed away to find Glendower and left you at the bottom of a lake, what then? You'd be your own then, wouldn't you?_

This was such a clear thought that he could not feel sorry for it. He did not want to, anyway.

What he offered them was not enough. Money, plans, advice. It was not enough. He did not need to be magical himself, and he would not begrudge them the magic they had. He had so much more than they did that it would not be right. But he needed them to see that he belonged with them. Didn't he?

_Glendower would not have saved you if you didn't_ , he told himself, while pulling on his slacks and shoes and waiting for the Father to return with the oars. Glendower. Glendower, always and forever the one thing that made sense. Gansey was no fool, but he knew that searching for his king made him appear so. His parents tolerated it because Gansey seemed to make such an enjoyable sport of it, a hobby fit for a scion, a hybrid interest in world travel and rock climbing and spelunking and deep sea diving and ancient history, a curious and carelessly expensive pursuit. But Gansey's chosen quest was a great deal stranger than that. Glendower had chosen Gansey, had saved Gansey.

Why?

Gansey's first wish, the original wish, had been simply to know why. He did not need great favors. He only needed to know what had made the sleeping king choose him. He only needed to know that it was not his money, not his name, but something deeper and truer. In his dreams, Glendower told him something honest about himself, showed him who he was and could be without the money.

He decided not to put his shirt back on. It was hot on the rocks by the lake. It would be hotter with the work of rowing factored in, especially now that the misty clouds of morning were creeping towards the church and away from the blue mirror before him. So he folded his button-down twice, first with the indifferent manner of someone used to tossing clothes in a traveling bag. Then, annoyed at the uneven lines this produced, more carefully, like his father had shown him. He thought of Adam's suit hanging in the car and wondered if he could make one of the selkies go fetch it, since Adam wouldn't want it left behind. He scratched at one mother of pearl button and compared it to the brilliance of the shell boat.

This was not enough to keep anxiety at bay. Maybe if he had something more interesting to occupy his time, maybe if this place produced useful things: EMF readers, or geophones. If he had his own equipment, well-worn and well-cared for. Maybe if he had the Pig. Maybe if he had any of the things that signified the person he was now, after years of search. 

He had the strange thought that this place might give him something, but it wouldn't give him that.

He had the strange thought that this place could not become _his_.

He folded the thought away with practiced movements. He was dwelling. It was no good to anyone to dwell. Now he saw the impracticality of it. He stood. He would return to the car for Adam's suit bag, a courtesy Adam hardly deserved at this point, and when he returned he would row across the lake to wherever Adam was by now. Then perhaps he would send a selkie down to get Adam. 

He made his way across the rocks, through the grassy streets, through the woods. Trapped in the chill of the trees, he began to consider putting on his shirt. A person could not wander shirtless through strange woods, or at least they should not. Not according to the rules Gansey had been raised with. Even if he now found this forest even wilder and colder than it had been on first acquaintance. He remembered Father Tierney's question: what is Henrietta? Gansey had to wonder if this was even still Virginia, a Virginia of windchime trees and selkie villages. Virginia had always been his in an established and perfunctory way, the domain of generations of his family. Ganseys who'd joined the Revolution to avoid paying debts back to England, Ganseys who'd received the colony's first land grants, Ganseys to populate Jamestown. 

But there were places even in Virginia that were too wild and terrifying and lovely to reduce to so much well-aired and indifferent family history. Ruined churchyards, cursed caves, the great dark sprawl of Henrietta under the stars. And now this. 

He came to the fork in the road. He knew the straight path ahead was the road to the church and the car, but he could hear Father Tierney somewhere along the second path, cursing in a very un-priestly fashion and sounding like he was struggling with something. Gansey let him alone long enough to return to the car and gather up Adam's suit and some provisions from the trunk and glovebox, which he folded into his shirt. Then he took the second road, following the Father's voice.

Father Tierney stood in a clearing, trying to reach the oars of an oar tree.

Gansey blinked. The scene did not rearrange itself. The Father hopped like a mad thing, trying to reach the high-hanging fruit of a tree that conveniently sprouted oars. It was not the only supremely convenient tree. There were trees that grew diving equipment, trees that grew life vests, trees that grew rigging and sails for boats that had perhaps not been built yet. Had not grown in yet. It seemed to be the same thing here.

Gansey settled his things by the trunk of a sail tree and kneeled next to the Father, lacing his hands together to make a solid foothold.

"I'll give you a boost," he said, startling the Father out of his frantic hopping. Father Tierney looked both embarrassed and grateful, and again seemed very scarred. Gansey carefully avoided looking at his face. The Father put a hand on his shoulder and a tentative foot in his hands and Gansey boosted him up. There was an uncertain moment, the priest grasping at air, before his scarred hands caught one of the oars and he pushed off from Gansey's hands. He dangled for a moment, young and silly in his cassock. Then he dropped to the ground and took the branch with him, a slender brown stretch of tree that looked too lightweight to support its sculling oars and sweep oars and oars of all possible varieties. Gansey let the Father collect himself as he tested the shafts and blades, trying to determine which would be most useful when one's craft was an oversized shell. He found two that might be suitable and wrenched them easily from the fallen bough.

"I have to admit," Father Tierney said, after a moment, "this grove might have been the first thing to give me suspicions. About the people here, I mean."

"So it's been here a long time?" Gansey said. He was somewhat disappointed to think that he hadn't dreamed up the grove himself, just by asking for what he needed.

"Been here as long as I've been here," said Father Tierney.

"Why didn't you ever take advantage of it?" Gansey said. "It's obviously here to let you explore the lake."

Father Tierney looked so scandalized that his scars vanished from view for a moment. 

"I can't leave the church!" he said.

"You're not a real priest," Gansey reminded him. "And your friend left."

His, and Gansey's.

Father Tierney opened his mouth and closed it. He looked young and -- Gansey realized -- scared. Gansey made a decision. Digging in his pockets, he produced the keys to the planted BMW. They smelled strongly of almonds. He dropped them in the Father's hands.

"If your true self is a priest," he told the Father, "like you think he is, then stay here. Otherwise, I think it's best to go looking for him."

He turned to go, but remembered something.

"What did Mannix mean?" he asked Father Tierney. "About this place being awake?"

Father Tierney's scars came into prominence. Suddenly, he looked like fragile, picked-apart somehow.

"I don't know," he admitted. "But I've never seen the night here. I've never needed it. I've never even slept."

Gansey stared at him, trying to process this.

"They said that a king sleeps here," he said. "At Alter."

"If he does," said Father Tierney thoughtfully, "Then he must be the only one."

Gansey left him in the sailors' grove. 

At the shore, the selkies waited. They swarmed the shell boat in its lonely path across the lake, staying clear of the arc of the oars. Gansey himself focused on following the ones in the lead, a torturous process without a proper coxswain. He tried not to worry when the selkies dipped below the water, tried not to assume that it was because something was happening to Adam. He liked rowing because one rarely worried when rowing. It was such pure work that there seemed no space for worries. He was glad he'd chosen to use his shirt as a makeshift knapsack. It meant he was at the very least not sweating into his collar.

After some time, he could make out a rocky island. And on it: Adam.

The island was chalk and dusty brown earth, the colors of Adam. This did not improve the vision. If anything, it made Adam seem wan and crumpled and colorless. He seemed too fine-boned and fair. Gansey had the horrible sense he might be washed out by the sun if he did not reach him time. 

Gansey did not think beyond that. He simply rowed.

He barely noticed when the selkies dived under, their task complete. He reached the island and pulled the shell boat ashore, reached Adam and checked his pulse, reached for his torso, pressed and breathed into his mouth on automatic. He was no longer angry; he was now simply panicked. 

Adam's mouth sputtered, opened, choked. His fine, thin hands were grasping something. Two somethings. Gansey, who felt like his nerves were somehow curling around his heart, could not immediately tell what.

Adam opened his eyes. One of his hands scrabbled at Gansey's chest and pressed something soggy against it. It was a card, the missing tarot card, or at least the remaining shreds of it. Adam coughed up water. 

"They expire," he told Gansey in fits and starts. "They've only got so much magic. Use it up, and they're no good."

This was useful information, but Gansey felt like shaking him. It was not information worth nearly drowning for. But then Adam's other hand came up. In it he was holding tight to a mirror -- a hand mirror. This Gansey took as well, turning it over quickly. The back had strange carvings of roots and vines. The glass itself reflected nothing but dazzling sunlight. 

Then it changed. The light pooled and danced with shadow, with the harsh lines of a very familiar face. Thick-lashed, satisfied, dangerous eyes. A smile like an attack. And the rest of him, the long legs, the powerful form, the soaring bird keeping pace with the side-view mirror, the shark-nosed car like just another piece of him, a piece he had no compunctions about warring with. 

"Ronan?" Gansey said. Then, incensed:

"Is he _racing_?"

-

The Camaro thundered down the road.

It was not Gansey's Camaro, but very nearly Gansey's Camaro, which Blue supposed was Ronan Lynch's idea of an apology. This was not going to be enough to save Ronan.

Blue was not scared of cars these days, after all. Gansey had let her handle the real Camaro once. That had been as good a lesson as any she'd ever receive, a license to be reckless and dangerous. She'd loved it. It had suited her.

It suited Ronan Lunch more. She'd once seen Ronan scare a police officer into shamed silence while the officer was writing him a traffic ticket. Ronan was somehow untouchable, a scorpion on the road, a sting in every sudden swerve. He was a crocodile. A carpet viper. A--a honey badger.

She was running out of animals to furiously contemplate while Ronan edged ahead. But badgers felt right, anyway. They were dangerous, but Blue was not the least bit afraid of them. This was just how she classed Ronan. This made it somehow very important that she not lose to him. She suspected he had no idea that she thought he was a honey badger. Somehow it seemed as though beating him would make it clear. He probably knew nothing about the animals, and would be offended. Good.

"Come on," she told the Camaro. "Come on!"

She felt it in her soul that it would not be right for the Pig to lose. But she also felt, sensibly, that she wasn't sure what winning or losing counted for. What were they racing towards? Were they racing until one of their cars broke down? Could dream cars do that? What were the rules, where was the finish line? 

While she considered this, Ronan thundered on, scored a solid lead. Thinking and racing were not complimentary activities, and Ronan handled his dream-BMW with such effortless thoughtlessness that it was clear he wasn't thinking. He was _feeling_ , his hand flashing a careless and victorious gesture, his mouth a sudden vicious grin.

He was going to win. It was unforgivable. Blue felt as though she were letting down Gansey and the Camaro, and, worst of all, letting down herself. Her foot mauled the pedal. Again she berated the car.

"Come on, come _on_."

Ronan's laughter reached her, something ferocious and oddly natural that he tossed from the window of the BMW. The laughter spattered against the Camaro windshield and colored it all over with enough annoyance that Blue couldn't seem to see or feel anything else. She found herself yelling, apropros of nothing, "I will not lose to a honey badger!"

Up ahead, Ronan faltered. Whatever he was doing to drive the BMW to its limit ceased, very briefly. Blue did not see it. She did not even think it, the delicious image of Ronan sitting puzzled, momentarily distracted, his face a snarl. _Did she just fucking call me a honey badger?_

It was a beautiful sight and a tempting one, but Blue was pulling ahead, clear-minded, winning, free. She whooped delightedly. She scarcely noticed Ronan's fury in the rearview mirror. 

The Camaro was so marvelous and victorious that she wanted to scream. The road laid itself out like an unspooled ribbon in front of her, like if she tugged on it some great present would appear. For a few minutes nothing did. Then, in the distance, the great loops and whorls of a candy-colored false mountain. A rollercoaster. Lights. Bright tent tops, spinning. A slowly turning Ferris Wheel. A fair. 

That was the finish line, because Blue decided it must be so. When she reached the fair, she would see the BMW definitively beaten. Now when her foot touched the pedal, the Pig gave an answering roar of victory. It was an agile, loping animal that agreed with her in all things. As it pulled into the fairground it kicked up a great heap of dust and swerved wildly, with indecorous self-satisfaction. Blue breathed hard and hardly realized she was grinning. It did not seem possible that she was the same Blue Sargent who waited tables and walked dogs. She was. She had won anyway. Her car -- Gansey's, she reminded herself. _Gansey's_ \-- continued its victorious purr until she switched off the ignition.

The lights of the fairground played tricks, coloring the now-slumbering Camaro several unrecognizable shades. Red. Green. Blue-orange, which was a color that should not have existed, an insect wings' color. Blue blinked. 

While she waited for Ronan to catch up, she stepped out of the car and approached the fairground entrance. It was not a great distance, but with every step she took the lights colored her differently. Purple Blue. Blue Blue. Purple-blue Blue. She was still in her plain old work clothes, Nino's apron balled in her jacket pocket because she'd meant to take it home and wash it. But she acquired new dimensions in the light. She should not have. There should not have been anything special to this light, to this fair. The entrance was nothing more than two humble wooden posts hung with colored lanterns, a nailed sign that announced this as a TRAVELING FAIR. A smaller sign said (WILL NOT TRAVEL TOO FAR), like a joke. It was all normal enough. 

Yet when Blue looked at her iridescent skin and clothes, she had the odd feeling that the fair wanted her to walk towards it, and that this color-trick was the first invitation. 

_Come and be someone different_ , the fair seemed to say.

She stopped. 

She wasn't sure she wanted to be anyone different. More, yes. She had always wanted to be something more. But more was not necessarily different, and Blue did not see why it should have to be.

In the time it took her to pause, two things happened. The first was that Ronan roared into the fairground, making his irritation at losing plain by a series of shrieks and swerves that grazed one of the entrance posts. The second was that when he did this, something -- two somethings -- atop the post took flight.

They landed in her hair.

Blue's instinct was to shriek herself. She did not shriek. She couldn't explain it. There were two solid bodies on either side of her head, heavy living barrettes with wings whirring against her hair. She could hear a grating, slow-pulsed sound start up somewhere nearby. Familiar. Louder than she'd ever heard it before. 

She stayed very still as Ronan slammed his way out of the car and came to meet her. He was busy looking dangerous about his loss on the road, so he did not immediately look at her. He said, "Did you call me a fucking--" and stopped, and stared. Chainsaw came and roosted on his shoulder and looked disapproving. Which was somewhat hypocritical.

"You have bugs in your hair," he told Blue. 

"I think they're cicadas," she said quietly, not sure if she wanted to avoid spooking them, not sure if she was afraid and wanted them gone. "Are they cicadas?"

"They're gross," Ronan said unhelpfully. "They're giant and multi-colored and gross."

The cicadas' wings whirred faster, as if they could hear this and were irritated by it. Blue could feel them moving against her scalp. 

"Seriously, you're wearing a bug hat," Ronan said.

Blue remembered something Adam had told Ronan once that had struck her as perfectly suited to handling Ronan. Possibly the most appropriate instruction one could ever give to Ronan Lynch.

"Ronan," she said. "Don't be a shitbag."

Ronan looked mutinous, but he came closer and lifted one of the cicadas out of her hair. It was so large that Blue immediately felt more lightheaded for loss of it, so large that Ronan had to hold it with both hands. Its wings were so long that they brushed his forearms. It was remarkably beautiful, its black body spotted dandelion yellow, wings a bright blue threaded through with gold. It looked made of metal. It looked like an ornament. Blue carefully lifted the other one out of her hair and looked at it. This one was pearly white and gold and grass green. Its ruby eyes stared at her.

The first one did something Blue had never seen cicadas do, which was sniff. She couldn't tell how it sniffed. It didn't have a nose. It sniffed anyway. Then it very stiffly crawled halfway up Ronan's forearm, turned around, and showed Ronan the hind-most parts of its abdomen. It pushed off of his arm, alighting on Blue's shoulder.

Neither she nor Ronan spoke for a moment.

"I just had a bug show me its ass," Ronan said.

"It doesn't have an ass," Blue said, annoyed. The more she held the white-gold-green cicada, the more she began to think it wasn't a cicada at all but some intricate jeweled thing. A robot so lifelike it seemed like a real cicada. Or else something so real it was better than real, and began to look ornamental and fake. It continued to gaze at her, looking strangely trusting for a massive insect. Blue decided that she liked it.

"It has an abdomen with sternites and tergites, probably," she told Ronan, lifting it up with both hands so she could peer at it better. "And it's not doing the singing -- that's the males off somewhere trying to attract it -- so this one's a female and so is the other one."

"Don't look at it. It's going to fly off and scratch your face," Ronan told her. "Get a better pet."

"What, like a raven?"

"Chainsaw never stuck its ass in my ear just to make me a raven hat," Ronan said. He looked disgusted. He turned on his heel and started towards the fairground. 

Before she followed, Blue put the white-gold cicada on the dusty ground for a moment and pulled her Nino's apron out of her pocket, tying it around her middle. The cicada crawled placidly up her leg. She scooped it up and put it in one of the apron pockets, then took its blue-black companion from her shoulder and deposited it in the other pocket. Twin pairs of bulbous ruby eyes peeked out at her, trusting. They were not light, but Blue supposed that if they could handle some jostling then they could travel with her, at least for a little while. She liked them. They were oddly-sized and strange in a way that was all theirs. This comforted Blue.

The fair was fully operational, to go by the rotating Ferris Wheel, the booths putting out tinny music, the popcorn popping at the popcorn stands. It was also empty. Pink and yellow banners advertised funnel cakes, lemonade, cotton candy, hot dogs. There was no one there to serve these things. Carousel horses whirled around under their red-and-black-spotted awning. No one rode on them. There were lonely bumper boats colliding slowly and uselessly in their pool, a pendulum ride looping about in perfect solitude, a deserted fun slide, one single splashing log flume with no occupants, a still and abandoned tilt-a-whirl. Ronan stopped and stared at the loud hive of lights and emptiness, looking as wary as Blue felt.

"Where do you think the people went?" she asked.

"Why would you think that's a thing I want to think about?" Ronan said in response. This was a fair point. Just behind him, at a brightly-colored booth, chickens turned on a spit that clicked and whirred, as living-sounding as the cicadas.

Maybe Adam and Gansey were somewhere within the recesses of the fairground, in a haunted house, or a funhouse mirror maze. Blue didn't think they could turn back without at least checking. 

"Come on," she said, starting deeper into the fair. "Let's look for them and then get out."

Ronan caught her sleeve. She stared at him. It was uncharacteristic of him to reach for her. They were not -- no. She amended this. They were close, or close enough. Ronan had lit the way for her, when her mother had still been trapped in the cave. Ronan had given her the lantern. Ronan had comforted her. But that Ronan of the underground was a rare breed or something, not a Ronan found during daylight hours. She had to wonder if it hadn't just been a fluke, the universe forgetting how it was supposed to function.

But then, she had to wonder if maybe she didn't know anything about Ronan, really. She wouldn't have guessed that he liked Adam, for example. She'd never given much thought to Ronan and Adam, because that was like thinking _huge and disruptive cicada_ and _bejeweled hair ornament_. The two thoughts did not necessarily go together. 

"Sit there," Ronan instructed now, pointing behind her at the tilt-a-whirl. It was the only seat available. Most county fairs had picnic tables or benches, but not this one. This one had only rides and booths to pop balloons in and stands for food, as though it wanted to keep them moving along. 

Blue wanted to keep moving along. She said, "Why?"

"Just do it," said Ronan, and somewhat awkwardly jostled her towards the tilt-a-whirl. Blue felt as though she ought to be offended, but she could not be entirely offended. She had seen Ronan Lynch break off and try to punch people as tall as he was. This ginger handling was not that. It was crude and unsure and frustrated, like he was trying to pet a small animal but had his hands balled into fists.

"Don't push me," she told him. "I'll go." She went to sit in tilt-a-whirl car, and he shouted at her to move to a closer one, one that was facing him. Rolling her eyes, she moved.

"Watch me and stay still," Ronan called out. "Whatever you do, stay still."

She rolled her eyes again. Ronan stepped up to the booth with the rotating chickens. He reached behind the booth and pulled out a white paper cone. There was a cotton candy vat next to the chickens. With practiced movements, he circled the edges of the vat with the cone until it was layered with green candy floss. Then, calmly, he opened the lit glass case with the chickens. He held the cotton candy over one of the whirring spits, at the corner. Nothing happened for some time. Blue squinted, confused. She thought maybe he was letting the candy melt onto the spit. It did seem to be slowing down. 

It stopped, jammed. The chicken hung sadly in midair. Ronan stepped back, fast and wary, like he was waiting for something to happen.

The booth uncurled itself. Legs, femur, tibia, and tarsus erupted from underneath. The aluminum siding of it was not siding -- it was tergum and spiracle. The back was a rolled-up thorax, the roof sprouted compound eyes, mandibles, labium. Its head clicked uselessly. The body rolled in on itself until it could find the place where Ronan had disrupted its functioning. A whip-like tongue emerged, long and hairy, and began to suck at the candy floss. Its abdomen knocked into the carousel as this happened, and in response the red carousel canopy fluttered once, twice, and then closed around the horses. Its legs scuttled out, and it lifted itself up on them, turned, and calmly relocated to several feet away, where it upset the log flume ride, which revealed a segmented millipede underside as it bucked and stood and crawled away from the carousel. 

The carousel was a lady bug. The booth was a -- a something bug. The entire fair was _bugs_.

Blue had always liked bugs, and so part of her was very interested. Another part felt the way Ronan looked: white as a sheet. If it was all bugs, then even the tilt-a-whirl was possibly a bug. She jerked upright almost without meaning to. 

In response, the entire tilt-a-whirl tilted, like it too was uncurling and setting out its back legs. The safety bar on Blue's seat knocked into her and locked into place. She struggled with it uselessly. She heard Ronan give a shout and he was there a moment later, wrestling with the bar. He managed to dislodge it, but the tilt-a-bug released its front legs and he fell into the seat next to her, cursing. The safety bar came down again. The massive insect stood and aimlessly scuttled a figure eight on the dusty ground. Every turn made the cars whir and shriek. The ride started up in earnest.

Blue liked bugs. She _hated_ tilt-a-whirls. The purpose of a tilt-a-whirl seemed to be to squash people together in as many ways as possible. For Ronan it could not be so bad. Blue was small. Being squashed by Blue was nothing. But with every sudden jerk and whip-fast turn, the car would would rearrange itself so that all six-foot-something of Ronan would smash into all of Blue in revenge. She buried her face in Ronan's arm and tried not to vomit or take it personally. His elbow was in her ear. Chainsaw had taken flight and now screeched uselessly around the car. Ronan shouted at the raven not to attract the tilt-a-bug's attention, but she didn't seem to hear him. 

He then shouted, "I told you not to move!"

"You didn't tell me I was sitting in a bug!"

"I showed you!" Ronan insisted, like this was better.

"Right!" Blue managed. "Thanks for that!"

Her hand slapped his face. His jaw careened with the top of her head. She hoped it hurt his jaw as much as it hurt her head, but then they were looping around too fast to think and she became queasy again, so she dropped the thought. 

"I hate bugs!" Ronan said. Yelled. Into her ear.

"I hate tilt-a-whirls! We're even!"

She thought it might never stop and she would die, uselessly spinning inside an insect. That did not happen. Eventually the tilt-a-bug settled down again; the ride ground to a halt. Ronan was squashed onto Blue who was squashed onto the side of the seat. She pushed at him until he got off and dislodged the safety bar, and then they both staggered out. Blue's legs felt insubstantial, but then so did the earth. Chainsaw buried her face in Ronan's neck in agitation. The large cicadas -- small ones, Blue amended -- peeked out of her apron again, miraculously unharmed.

"I hate bugs," Ronan said again. He was bent over, his hands on his knees, panting. "Declan bought a, a fucking _Madagascar hissing cockroach_ once. My dad thought it was a normal roach and killed it."

Ronan did not often reminisce about his childhood with her, and Blue knew she should appreciate it, but she was too busy being bent over double herself, unsure if she would throw up.

"How did you know?" she managed, once her stomach seemed to settle. 

He was quiet, still panting. After a minute, he admitted, "Calla was right. I've been here."

Blue straightened up and stared at him.

"When?" she asked. "Was it--was it with your dad, or--"

"If I knew more than that, I would have told you," Ronan snarled. "I just had an idea that I knew this, and that these things were -- they're dream things, alright? It's all dream things. And in a dream anything can be something else."

He looked furious. He straightened up, batting Chainsaw away as she continued to flutter anxiously near him, and started off towards the haunted house. Blue had been ready to wonder if it was safe, if the giant insects might not make a meal of them if they got in too deep. But something about Ronan Lynch throwing caution to the winds settled her. Ronan was not actually incautious; he just pretended to be. In reality he was lanterns for dark caverns, and a furious battle of wills with the Cabeswater cave to save his friends. 

She hurried to catch up with him. He didn't say anything else, and the cloud of his black mood was so thick she wondered if it would actually come into being in this place. She could think it, so she couldn't see why it shouldn't be so. 

"Why doesn't it respond to my thoughts?" she asked aloud, when nothing happened and the cloud failed to appear.

Ronan slowed.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Well, Cabeswater does. I thought of blue lilies once, and Cabeswater gave them to me," she said. "And when we were in the cave and asked it not to hurt Gansey, it listened."

"It could have just been listening to me," Ronan said.

"I don't think it was. I think it was all of us," Blue said. She remembered it vividly, the three of them threatening Cabeswater. When a magical forest actually listened to you, it wasn't something you forgot.

"Well, this one just listens to me," Ronan said, and lapsed back into a moody black silence all the more remarkable for their surroundings. Deeper into the fairground, the rides became wilder and more dangerous-looking, more brightly patterned in pinks and turquoises and day-glo yellows. Maybe they would be Amazonian bugs, Blue decided. She'd like to see Amazonian bugs. Though ideally she'd like to see them when they were their normal size. 

" _Don't_ look at the rollercoaster," Ronan said. 

She looked anyway. It was not one insect, but many. Many things that were segmented and that burrowed and had built a stepladder home, and she did not know how it could possibly work like a rollercoaster, but she believed that it did. Bugs. But a working fairground, too. The prizes at the shooting booths were all stuffed butterflies and glow-worm dolls, and there were crane games that offered giant, amiably buzzing bees as a prize. Ronan looked especially enraged by these, and it took Blue a moment to realize why. 

Gansey.

She missed him. The missing was a lovely and true pain in her. She wanted him here, and she wanted to tell him the truth. Should have told him. He would die before the year was out. It hurt now not because it was so certain, but because she'd had him before her and had only fought with him. 

Their time was limited. The lovely pain became a savage thing. The cicadas clicked against her, as though trying to comfort her.

An odd thought came to the surface.

"Did you ever like Gansey?" she asked.

"Yes," Ronan said. "Believe it or not: I like my best friend."

"Like-like, not regular like," Blue said. 

Ronan's look was a scorching thing. " _I_ know who I _like_ -like," he said, mimicking, taunting with nasty enthusiasm.

"That doesn't answer my question," Blue said, choosing to ignore the dig despite her better instincts. It wasn't that it didn't make sense for Ronan to like Adam. Adam was likable; Blue herself had wanted to like him. But Ronan spent more time with Gansey than anyone else -- he had the time with Gansey that Blue wished she had. And Gansey was. Well. Gansey. It did not make sense for him not to like Gansey.

"If you're fucking asking _just_ so I can tell you that your thing with Gansey is safe from me--"

"That's not it," Blue protested. She was surprised that Ronan knew about the thing with Gansey. She was also surprised to find that she wasn't lying -- that really wasn't it. She'd always assumed she would be very good at conversations like these, but Ronan was reacting like he'd bared a wound and she'd stuck a thistle in it. She felt uneasy. He was right. She wasn't really asking about him, only about the parts of him that could impact her.

"That's not it," she said again. "It's--it doesn't matter. I can't be with Gansey and that's that. It would be too complicated, trust me. I just--"

She did not know a great deal about Ronan Lynch. Less than she knew about Adam, and Adam was famously bad at telling her anything real about himself. It was a sudden cold shock, to think that all this time she'd classed herself among the raven boys, but that, when you got down to it, she knew very little about at least half of the group.

"I'm glad you told me," she told Ronan, after a minute. "I think it's really brave that you said it. I know it's hard to come out with it like that."

Ronan gestured carelessly at himself, his buzzed head, his wrist bands, his ripped jeans, his tattoo. But his words were low and tight. 

"I'm honest about everything else. You think I'm going to lie to you about being gay as shit?"

Blue had the sense that this was the first time he'd said it out loud. Gay as shit. 

"Not sure how gay that is," she said.

"It's pretty fucking gay," Ronan said.

"Well, I'm glad you could come out with it and tell me," Blue said, as they neared a mirror maze. "Now I'm not the only one who doesn't know."

Ronan stopped so abruptly that she walked into him, tripped, and made the startled mirror maze unfurl its butterfly wings. 

"The only other person who knows is Noah," he said shortly. "You think I go around talking about this to _Gansey_? And Adam?" 

Blue stared at him. "You told me before telling them?" she said. She could hardly believe it. But Ronan looked down at her so disdainfully that she knew it had to be the truth. He didn't lie. 

"I won't tell them," Blue said. "I promise. Not unless you want me to."

That seemed to be as much as Ronan wanted to hear on the topic. He rudely cut off any other attempts to talk about it all through their exploration of the mirror maze. Blue didn't allow it to bother her. As much as Ronan complained about exploring the innards of a giant bug, the maze was an apt place for him at this moment. Ronan stretched and shrunk in the reflections, not one boy but several, each angled a little differently. Blue felt wiser now, and a little angry at herself for never bothering to examine the different reflections Ronan could cast.

But they did not find Gansey and Adam in the mirror maze. And the haunted house was very quiet and still when they approached it. Blue thought they would have at least heard shouting if the boys were inside, or laughter, or something. She'd never been to a haunted house with Gansey and Adam, but she thought it would be a boisterous thing. Suddenly she wanted to go. Gansey squaring his shoulders and leading the way. Adam quiet and unaffected, making faces at Ronan when he knew Ronan was looking. Gansey being funny, all stern and silly disappointment over the inadequacy of the props. Noah more spooked than all the rest of them, despite being a ghost. Gansey holding her hand in the dark.

But this was an empty kiddie ride. No Gansey, no Adam. Just odd masks and crepe hanging from the ceiling, bowls of peeled grapes on tables and large posed bears with fake blood on fake muzzles.

"They're not here," Ronan announced irritably, just when the silence seemed to be too much. They turned a corner and found a wall splattered with a cheesy glow-in-the-dark warning sign, shouldered through a thick plastic curtain, turned into a room full of large plastic coffins. "They're not here and I crawled inside a fucking bug."

As he said this, something very pale and very unexpected danced along the edge of the coffin behind him. Blue almost didn't pay it any attention, and then she did. Fingers. White ones, short and skinny. Then the whole hand. Then the whole arm.

Blue screamed. 

The arm touched Ronan, and he gave a shout and jumped into her. They threw themselves back and the walls around them began to shake. Their living transport was waking, sprouting wings and legs and mandibles in annoyance. 

The arm dangled loosely down the side of the coffin and waved at them. After a terrifying moment, a familiar smudgy head cleared the top of the coffin and joined it.

"Boo," Noah said.


	9. Chapter 9

Ensconced in his plastic coffin, Noah was largely safe from the shuffling and bumping that occurred when the bug took flight.

Blue and Ronan were not. Coffins tumbled off their plaster plinths, fake spiderwebbing rained down from the walls. Ronan ripped it off of his face in time to see Noah sailing by in his coffin. The coffin sailed serenely, a cheap-yet-solid protective bubble for its occupant. Noah sailed like he was spooked, which he was. In a literal sense.

"Dick move, Noah," Ronan shouted, shielding his face from an onslaught of fake rubber bats. 

"I know you throw me around all the time," Noah called back. His idea of a rebuttal. 

"He does? What?" Blue said. 

She deftly managed to seize hold of a passing coffin and pull herself into it before anything could hit her. Ronan echoed this, lunging for the nearest coffin himself. The inside was stuffed with hollow plastic bones. He tossed them at Noah as the insect shifted and the room shifted with it, coffins sailing back the other way. 

"Why's the room moving?" Noah said, looking even clammier than usual in the weak light. 

"You," Ronan said. "You. You. You."

"It's a bug," Blue said. "A big one. Dream bug. Dream thing bug."

"Oh," Noah said. Because he was Noah, none of this made him register surprise, though it did make him steady himself in his coffin and blink at his own arms like he wasn't sure if they were there or not. He only seemed surprised that he was not a wispy bit of spiderwebbing himself. 

"How did you get here?" Ronan called out. They continued to bob to and fro in an increasing pile of Halloween junk. Blue was trying to keep her coffin from sailing out of the door and into the next room.

Noah shrugged in answer, either too wispy to know or too knowledgeable to care.

"Well, it's a dream, isn't it?" Blue called out, still struggling in her corner. "And dreams are on the line, and _Noah's_ on the line--"

"Not Noah-Noah," Ronan said, annoyed. Rotting bones in a church were not Noah. 

"I don't know," Noah said in answer. "Maybe."

"Maybe nothing," Blue said. "You're always fading in and out along the line. If dreams are on the line, then it stands to reason that you can fade in and out of dreams, too." 

There was dream logic in that. It tumbled oddly out of Blue Sargent's mouth. Ronan blinked at her. Blue was a girl who came in _sensible_ , as opposed to _mysterious_ , or _magical_ , or _appealing_ , or whatever it was your average girl was supposed to come packaged in. Ronan wouldn't know. Either way, he wouldn't have expected this from Blue.

The full meaning of her words penetrated a moment later.

"You're jumping in and out of dreams?" Ronan said. He felt cold, enraged. His mind seemed too full to consider why.

Noah looked as affronted as a dead boy inside a dream could possibly look. 

"I bet you get lost sometimes, too," he said. "I bet you're lost right now."

The room rocked itself as the bug finally decided to land. Noah's coffin bounced, a strange sight because he certainly looked solid enough, not as weightless as he could. 

Ronan said, "I'm not lost. The maggot and I planned to come here."

"Planned is maybe a generous way of saying it," Blue said, sighing and picking false spiderwebs out of her hair.

"It's intentional. We're not lost," Ronan insisted. 

Blue said, "Maybe Noah intentionally got lost. Remember, Noah? You were talking how something wouldn't be a problem for long, and then you gave me the Transformer. Noah, did you plan this? Did you know this was coming?"

As the room settled around them, Noah tried to remove great handfuls of the webbing tangled in his hair. He somehow managed to tangle them worse.

"Did you know this was coming?" Blue tried again. "Was this intentional?"

Noah looked blank in response. Ronan climbed out of his coffin and went to pull the webbing off of him. The conversation irritated him; it was like trying to explain the sky to a deep sea clam. 

"Drop it," he advised Blue. She looked annoyed, but dropped it. They picked their way through the room and into the next, which was just as disordered, piled with bloody rubber hands, plastic skeletons, fake things floating in jars. Chainsaw had flown briefly into a corner of this room during the commotion. Now she made a ladylike sound of offended pride and alighted on Ronan's shoulder. Having her with him, he determined to get out. He didn't want to be here when the bug started righting its innards, which it was bound to do soon.

"Come on," he told Noah and Blue. He started for the next room and the exit.

They didn't follow. Noah was bent over Blue's apronful of cicadas, saying, "What are their names?" 

"Spit and Hurl," Ronan said. "Come on. Let's go."

"Hi, Spit," Noah said, waving each finger on his right hand in succession, like he'd only ever been told how to wave and never shown the proper way. "Hi, Hurl."

"Those aren't their names," Blue corrected. "I'm going to give them better names than that. Wait and see."

"Hi, Wait," said Noah. "Hi, See."

Ronan felt the itch of irritation. They were inside a bug. He lifted his sneakers and they stuck to the floor. Out of the corner of his eye he could see small crawling things coming out of the walls, many-legged and thumbnail-sized. He wanted to squash them and knew it would only upset the large bug further. The crawling things swarmed around one rubber hand, lifted it, and began to carry it across the room to wherever it was supposed to go. Ronan grabbed Noah by one skinny shoulder and propelled him to the door.

"Rude," Noah said. But he didn't put up a fight. Ronan dragged him through two more rooms and out into the dusty sunlight. Blue followed at her own pace. As Ronan and Noah stood blinking at the distant lights of a fairground that now stood a mile away, she emerged holding handfuls of many-legged wriggly bugs. This was disgusting and Ronan told her so. Then he added, nastily, "What do you think mama bug is going to do if you don't put those back?"

Blue eyed the massive thing warily. It somehow managed to stay in the same place and yet _scuttle_. Ronan couldn't figure out how. It had to do with the legs. There were a lot of legs. Blue carefully held her hands out towards its top step and let the small crawling things return to their hive. 

Ronan thought of centipedes on his pillow and Declan laughing, a thought he hadn't thought in years and didn't want to think.

He'd climbed inside several bugs, and still no Adam and no Gansey. He ran his teeth along the backs of his hands. They were shaking. He hadn't noticed. It made the blue veins and sparse dark hair at the wrist jump, like coarse rivers and tributaries in a map that shifted, changed the landscape, reworked itself endlessly.

All the maps of this place would look like that. 

Ronan did know this place. He thought he'd seen it at night sometimes, for an instant, before falling into Cabeswater. He could catch a glimpse of it right before his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell into genuine dreaming. A place scored on the inside of his eyelids. 

The in-between land. This was where people went, if you stuffed them into dreams. He'd thought it would be Cabeswater, though. Why was it not Cabeswater?

Again, his mind felt so full that he could hardly breathe. 

Behind him, the haunted house bug stopped scuttling, released its wings, and took to the sky again, back in the direction of the fair. Ronan caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye and looked away. 

Blue and Noah were still speaking. He tuned them out. When he turned away from the fair, he could see something whirling and moving fiercely far away, some kind of dust storm. The bug had left them in a vast and dusty land, hot and airless under the sky. And standing there made Ronan feel like all the air had been sucked inside him and was churning there, building pressure, like the slow birth of a hurricane. He felt alive and creative, and it was not pleasant but simply right in a horrible way. 

Calla had said that this place was meant for him. What did that mean? 

"You know," Blue said, coming up behind him, "You were acting almost like Gansey back there."

Ronan stared at her. This was a senseless statement. But the longer he stared, the less sorry she looked for having said it. 

"Taking charge," she added. 

"He's rude about it," said Noah.

"Well, duh," said Blue. "But still."

She was looking for Gansey because she didn't have him, Ronan decided. It was a stupid move -- Ronan couldn't give her what she wanted. It felt disloyal, too. 

"I like you a lot less than Gansey does," he told her. 

Then he turned away again. He decided that he wanted the Camaro. In response, something in the distant fairground lit up and moved, and within a few minutes the car was revving towards them. Ronan decided that he would be driving. He expected Blue to argue, but she didn't. Seeing Noah changed her somehow -- she was distressingly sweet with Noah, and Noah was sweet back. It irritated Ronan. When the car came, she and Noah climbed easily into the back the way they always did when Gansey was driving. It left Ronan alone in the front seat, alone and still so creative.

The sky above the flat, dry land was streaked with color, like it couldn't decide on a time of day. Ronan headed for the road, away from that distant dust storm. Now the road seemed to him boring. An asphalt line sketched out by someone too ordered, someone with no imagination. Even the road signs seemed dull. TIERNEY'S COLLEGE. DREAMCATCHER GAOL. FIRSTBORN. ALTER. 

Tierney's College was only seventeen miles away. It appeared after no time at all, a square brick building surrounded by green hedges that looked as though they had been transferred from somewhere else. It was modestly-sized for a supposed college, but large enough otherwise. The sign in front was carefully painted, the hedges well-tended. The large windows gleamed. A man in coveralls was sweeping the top step. He stared at Ronan and Blue and Noah as they pulled up, then carefully tucked his broom in a corner of the porch and hurried inside.

Ronan blinked after him. For a moment, he'd thought the man's face was sliced up. Scarred.

"One of us should go in," Noah offered from the backseat. He did not offer to do it himself. He and Blue had been busy cooing over the over-sized nightmares that were Spitwait and Hurlsee, and now that they'd reached a new destination he didn't seem inclined to stop this. He was gently poking first one cicada and then the other. Blue gently pushed his hands away.

"I'll do it," she said, unbuckling her seatbelt. 

"We'll both do it," Ronan corrected. The college didn't look especially forbidding, but anything could be something else. Anything could become something different. Ronan did not trust the college to remain a college. Maybe it would be a ravenous spider instead. 

Noah trailed behind them as they climbed the steps to the door, kicking aimlessly at the broom on the porch.

"Respect other people's shit," Ronan instructed. After opening the door, he knocked one fist carelessly against a low-hanging lamp in the closed-off foyer. It was nauseatingly-patterned, Victorian glass cut into green pears and fat purple grapes. It swung satisfyingly on its chain. Chainsaw flew up and looped around it before landing back on Ronan's shoulder, pleased with this minor adventure. 

Blue rolled her eyes and pulled open the wooden double doors at the end of the foyer. These were Victorian-looking, too, with heavy silver knobs and spotless glass windows hung with lace curtains. The hallway just beyond had the same look -- everything heavy and old and moneyed, everything collegiate if by collegiate you meant, specifically, the Yale of a century ago.

The same man who had been sweeping the step was sitting behind a large wooden desk at the end of the hall, furiously scribbling something by the light of an old banker's lamp. He now looked very different: his hair was combed, his shirt was collared, his hands were clean, and his aspect was less janitorial and somehow very clerical.

It was still the same man, though, because his face was still cut up in a pattern of scars.

"You're here to register," he said, before they took even a step towards him. He sounded excited.

"No," Blue began politely. "We're here t--"

"What the hell is wrong with your face?" Ronan said.

The more Ronan looked at it, the more it bothered him. It wasn't scars. It was stitching. It was a blanket. It was comforting. It was horrifying. It was scars again. It would not _settle_ , and that was what irritated Ronan the most.

"You can see it?" the man said. It wasn't a man. He couldn't have been much older than Ronan. He just looked too old for his age, probably had looked that way since age fifteen, like Ronan himself. Ronan somehow liked him even less for this.

And then he liked him even less than that when the man concluded, happily, "You're very observant. You'll almost certainly be our top student."

"Observant?" Ronan said. "Someone took a jacknife to your face."

Noah giggled. Blue hissed, "Ronan, don't be a shitbag."

But the simple poetry of the word shitbag was, for once, entirely lost on Ronan. He had by now reached the desk and could see that his question hadn't fazed the young man at all, because he only responded by jotting down some notes. 

When he caught Ronan looking, he swept an arm over his papers and said, "Now, now. Let's not get ahead of ourselves just because you're keen. These are for the professor!"

" _Keen_?" said Blue, as though she couldn't believe this term might possibly be applied to Ronan.

"Keen!" laughed Noah.

"We're not here to enroll in your school," Ronan said, annoyed. 

"We already go to school," Blue said hurriedly, talking over Ronan like she was afraid Ronan would say something else that was inappropriate. "We're here to look for our friends. They're--"

"Where do you go to school?" said the young man. "Not in Firstborn?" Now he sounded suspicious. 

"In Henrietta," Blue said, just as Ronan said, "I'd rather go to community fucking college than this nightmare," and Noah said, "I don't go to school, actually."

Perplexingly, it was Blue's answer that the man settled on. "Where is Henrietta?" he asked carefully. 

Blue stared at him. So did Ronan, but only because his face was so disturbing. 

_Patchwork_ , Ronan thought. That was it. The man was a fading old quilt, and then you blinked and he became a war veteran. It seemed somehow deceptive when you factored in his facial expressions -- young and uncertain and unguarded, with a touch of the unbearably pompous.

Now he held up his hands (also scarred, also patchwork), and said, "No! Don't tell me! We'll ask the professor."

Then he stood and hurried through a side door and left them completely alone in the hallway. This was a good opportunity to explore some of the other side doors.

Ronan picked one at random and threw it open. It was a classroom. Antique desks, ancient chandelier, ancient blackboard. They might have been standing in Aglionby, except that even Aglionby was more modern than this.

Blue appeared at his elbow and said, "That man might come back." But she sounded curious and satisfied, not worried. She went to examine a large blue globe at the front of the room while Ronan looked under wooden benches, opened the closet door at the back of the room.

There was nothing in the closet except stacks and stacks of books and chalk and those long black pointer things teachers in old movies used. Academic robes and caps and boxes of shiny red apples. Inkpots and pens and notepaper and graph paper, rulers and protractors and hand-powered pencil sharpeners. Lunch pails. Textbooks. Globes. Scientific skeletons. Dunce caps.

The more things he pulled out and tossed behind him, the more he found; the deeper he went, the more there seemed to be. Until he was several feet in and still producing school supplies, the light of the room falling away behind him. 

It made him uneasy.

"I think I know what this is," he heard Blue say, back in the classroom.

"Is it Adam or Gansey? Because if this supply closet ate them, you'd think you could fucking help pull them out," he snarled.

Noah said something.

"What?" Blue said.

Ronan decided to go get her. He turned and groped his way back to the classroom, pushing off of anatomical dummies and boxes of pencils. When he was out he saw Blue and Noah bent over the globe. Blue looked fascinated. Noah looked like he couldn't decide on a look. Chainsaw rolled around the floor, pecking at fallen apples.

"We should tell--" Noah began. Then he broke off, confused. Hard to tell if it was because of Chainsaw, or something else.

"Tell me what," Ronan demanded.

Blue held the globe with one hand and traced a finger along it with the other.

"This is totally weird," she informed Ronan. Since it was a dream globe in a dream classroom, Ronan was not surprised that it was weird. He rolled his eyes and made a noise of disdain.

"Stop growling," Blue said. "I mean that these are ley lines. See?"

When Ronan approached the globe and examined it, he could see that it was a line. It was hard to tell whether it was the ley line, because it was hard to tell what the globe showed otherwise. Ronan was not an expert on geography, but if this was North America here then it had peninsulas where it shouldn't, rivers where no rivers existed, and inlets where probably there should have been outlets. The other continents weren't much better. 

And instead of latitude and longitude, it was mapped out sideways and diagonal, straight lines forming patterns of diamonds and hexagons across the surface of the planet. Ronan blinked at it.

It did look a little like Gansey's maps of ley lines. Not that Ronan had ever paid much attention to Gansey's maps of ley lines.

"I feel like this is Asia," Blue was saying. "I saw it on a map Gansey had, this ley line configuration--"

"It's not Asia," Ronan said, annoyed. He couldn't understand why ley lines mattered right now. "Asia doesn't have an ocean in the middle of it and it isn't shaped like a cloud--"

"Do we really know that?" Noah asked philosophically.

"Yes," Ronan said. 

"This could be important, anyway," Blue said. "I think we should take it. If we find Gansey again, he'll want to--"

" _If_?" Ronan said. 

"When," Blue said quickly. "When we find him." She flushed. "Anyway, we're not going to find him in a closet! I don't even know why you're looking there."

"Hopeful metaphor," Noah supplied.

Ronan stared at him. Noah did not look as if he realized he had said anything unusual, anything with bite. Bite was not Noah. For a moment, Ronan was disoriented.

"It could lead anywhere. It's a bottomless closet," he snapped, when recovered. 

"Is it?" Blue said. Now she became interested. She moved out from behind the globe and picked her way across the desks to the closet door, which had closed shut behind Ronan in the interim. Ronan waited smugly for her to open the door and discover the ever deepening tunnel behind it.

But instead she opened it and an apple tumbled out, sending Chainsaw screeching after it. The closet was full again, stuffed high with school supplies. A box of notepaper almost fell on her head.

"Very funny," she said, turning around. 

Enraged, Ronan stomped out to the hallway and picked another side door at random. 

Another classroom, identical to the first. Another closet door. Another pile of scholastic junk to dig and dig through. Again he closed the door and saw his hard work come to nothing. It was full again as soon as he opened it. 

He wondered what would happen if he went in and closed the door after him. He wondered if that was what had happened to Gansey and Adam. 

Before he could test the theory, Blue appeared and picked up a dunce cap he'd tossed on the desk and passed it to him without comment. Noah gave a startled laugh.

"She makes you an asshole," Ronan told him, throwing the cap aside.

"Sure," Noah said, shrugging.

"You're an asshole most of the time, so I don't see why it matters," Blue said. She had the ley line globe tucked under her arm, but Ronan didn't think any of the classrooms would miss it. He bet they all had a ley line globe. He bet they all had twenty more in their supply closets. He bet all the supply closets automatically refilled themselves.

Blue said now, "We should just ask that guy if they were here."

"Patchwork face," Ronan said.

"Don't be awful. They're scars," Blue said. "I think."

"What scars?" Noah said.

Both Blue and Ronan stared at him. Noah did not seem to realize that he'd said anything wrong. 

"Who are we talking about?" he repeated. He pulled himself up onto one of the desks, somehow simultaneously boneless and awkward about it, with that special graceless grace that Ronan's brother Matthew seemed to have.

He was very, very solid-looking at this moment. 

"What's up with you?" Ronan demanded.

"Nothing," Noah said. Then, uncertainly, worrywart-like, _Noah_ -like, "Nothing has been for a long time, I think."

Maybe the dream place was affecting him somehow. It was certainly still Noah underneath, Ronan thought. This blend of unrelenting truthfulness and inescapable depression was pure Noah. Ronan, who appreciated this side of him, nodded.

But Blue said, "Noah, couldn't you see that man's face? Out there?" She gestured at the hallway.

Noah shrugged. "What's wrong with it?"

Blue said, "He's scarred," and Ronan said, "Jason got to him and then somebody tried to put him back together again," and from somewhere behind them the young man said, "A- _hem_."

They turned. He stood in the doorway. He was in long academic robes and an academic cap. He had glasses on. He had a long pointer stick and some books and a red apple. He looked very severely at the globe under Blue's arm but did not comment, only swept up to the desk at the front of the room, where he arranged his apple and his books and hunted around for something in his desk. It was a piece of paper with some writing on it.

"Ronan Lynch?" he said suddenly.

Ronan felt the hairs on his neck stand up.

"Ronan Lynch?" the man repeated. He looked at Ronan over his spectacles, small and intelligent eyes nearly lost in the criss-crossing patchwork of his skin. Or perhaps not such intelligent eyes. He repeated Ronan's name again and then let his gaze roam around the room, resting on Blue, on Noah, on the anatomical skeleton model by the window. 

"How do you know my fucking name?" Ronan demanded furiously. He knew how. It was a dream. Other people did not know this, or did not want to understand. Dreams were intimate. Everything seemed to _know_ you.

"A simple present will suffice," the man informed Ronan. His eyes flicked down to his paper. "Blue Sargent?"

Blue got it faster than Ronan had.

"Present?" she hazarded.

The man nodded curtly. He looked down at the paper again. He became annoyed, and in his annoyance he looked all meaty and scarred and disgusting again. Ronan made a retching noise.

"You," the man said, ignoring this and pointing his thin black stick at Noah. "You haven't got a name. It's a jumble. It's a mess. I think it's all the letters at once."

"Sorry," Noah said.

"What's your name?" the man said.

"Wait and see," Noah said.

The man wrote this down.

"Wait and see!" he said.

"Present," Noah said.

Nodding, the man approached the board and wrote his name on it in large, loopy letters.

PROF TIERNEY BS MS PHD

Ronan swore. He was catching up now. And it was BS alright.

"Alright, take your seats," Professor Tierney said. "Class will now begin."


	10. Chapter 10

Adam sat dripping in the bottom of the shell-boat, watching Gansey row. 

He'd explained about the hidden underwater town while Gansey had helped him into the boat. Gansey'd had some difficulty registering the explanation. It was not that it was not remarkable. Everything here was remarkable. It was that, in the midst of all this wonder, Adam had still left him behind.

So the most Gansey could trust himself to say about any of this was that the townsfolk had revealed themselves shortly after Adam had jumped into the lake.

"Because I went into the lake," Adam guessed. 

Gansey looked out over his oars, checking their performance.

"Drowning yourself isn't something to be proud of."

"Cabeswater wanted me to--"

"Especially if Cabeswater told you to do it, Parrish. Pass me a peach. It's in that shirt."

Adam drew open the makeshift sack of Gansey's shirt, now stained with fruit juice. For a moment Gansey was certain he would hear about what it meant to ruin it. Adam did not handle carelessness lightly. 

But he didn't comment on the shirt. He took out a peach and passed it to Gansey.

In the bright light of the lake, he was more chalk than dust, colorless and terse. Gansey thought of the way he'd spasmed and choked, the way his chest had felt surprisingly fragile. The way Adam always seemed to find the worst of magic: the danger, the bargains, the drownings.

But he hadn't wanted Gansey along. So there was nothing Gansey could do.

"Are we headed the right way?" he asked Adam now. He wasn't sure the opposite bank wouldn't simply disappear. He wanted to marvel at this world freely, but now a part of him mistrusted the reverse-magic of this place, that could lure Adam underwater and leave him nearly-dead on the shore.

Now Adam nodded. It was an economical, serious gesture. Entirely Adam. Or was it? Gansey thought of Father Tierney's words.

An Autumn sense. A wrong thing for a boy. Not a boy, but maybe a forest. 

They had been able to see it, both the priest and the selkie, how Adam had been changed since his bargain with Cabeswater. And what was magic for if not to reveal how, and why, and how deeply?

"Gansey," Adam said suddenly. "Let's not fight. I--"

They weren't fighting. That wasn't the problem, not remotely. Gansey said, crisp about it: "You _jumped_ into a _lake_."

"I explained that--"

"No," Gansey said. "Thinking you needed to do it is not the same as an explanation."

Adam clenched his fists and looked away. Gansey almost didn't blame him for it. Gansey had looked away from him for a moment, or a month, or a summer. And in that time Adam had become something else.

Adam said, "I thought I needed to do it because it was important to Cabeswater. You know I do what Cabeswater says. Go where it wants me to go. And I did and now we can see Ronan--"

He took his mirror and held it up to make the point. Ronan seemed to be pilfering the cotton candy booth at a state fair. Gansey was briefly distracted by this. Maybe they shouldn't have left Ronan alone for the weekend.

He brushed the thought aside. At any other time, he would have wanted to examine the mirror but now he felt cluttered and electric and the mirror was only a reminder that Ronan wasn't with them. No Ronan, no Blue, no Noah. It was only him and Adam, the friend he was least-suited to understanding. 

"All I mean is that there was a reason for doing it," Adam was saying now. "That's why I asked you to trust me--"

"I trust you," Gansey said evenly. "I'm not sure where it gets me. Why didn't you just tell me what you were going to do?"

"They were right there, Gansey! Those seal people. What was I supposed to say?" 

Gansey pulled the oars towards himself and let them drift forwards. For a moment he felt cold and wild, as wild as he'd been when he had fantasized about leaving Adam at the bottom of the lake. He bit his cheek. He had so much more than Adam that he knew he should not speak in a mood like this; for once, even he knew that his words would not help. 

_Repugnant_ , flashed in his mind. Uncomfortable and loud and suited to the occasion. Repugnant. Repugnant. Repugnant.

A part of him wanted wanted to unearth the emotion there. Fling it up and hold it to the light. But he did not know how to begin, and a greater part of him remembered being unable to hold things back, what that was like, the panic and the buzzing in his ears. 

When he spoke now, he was grateful that his voice was controlled.

"You were supposed to say," he told Adam now, "that I could come with you. Like I do with you. You were supposed to say that _you_ trust _me_. You were not supposed to pass me by. _Again_."

This was better than what he wanted to say. This was only how friendship worked. This was only the truth.

It was still not enough. Gansey's words were not supposed to fail him and yet they had. He could see the hurt on Adam's face as soon as he'd spoken. He had mis-stepped, he had failed to understand. 

But still that cold, electric part of him asked: _When do_ you _try to understand_ me _?_

He closed his eyes and focused on the exertion of rowing. For once, it did not help. He was too tired of this. 

"Just tell me why you didn't invite me too," he asked Adam.

Perhaps there would be a reason. Perhaps he was at fault, perhaps he'd miscommunicated somehow. Perhaps he shouldn't have turned away this summer. He looked out over his oars again. They were rowing through a pool of sky. If he looked up, maybe above them he would find a dark lake like a mirror.

"I didn't think about it," Adam confessed, after a minute. "I just--Gansey, I--"

Now Gansey couldn't help himself.

"You're the same as always. You want to go it alone. What's it matter that I want to come with you?"

_What's it matter that when I don't, you almost_ die?

"It matters," Adam insisted. "Gansey, it matters more than anything."

"Good," Gansey said. "Then don't ever do it again."

That was it. That was the truth, so final even Adam couldn't contest it. Gansey refused to feel apologetic about it. He concentrated again on rowing, rhythmic, constant, until they reached the other side. The water lapped loud against the boat, the oars shearing it with every powerful stroke. Adam's shirt stuck to him in the heat. The sun was still high in the sky when Gansey pulled the shell boat onto the shore. 

Adam half-helped, pushing the boat and at the same time struggling to rescue its contents: mirror, suit bag, fruit. He scooped up the ruined shirt and the remaining fruit and tried patiently to make a bundle of it all. He was still pale and wan after his near-drowning. 

"Come on," Gansey said. "Let me." 

He took the shirt and the fruit and knotted it all easily, as if by this he could prove he was no longer angry. Doing this made him feel his shirtlessness acutely. It was hot enough that it didn't really matter, but a part of Gansey still felt unhappy to be wandering around like this. 

"I expect I'll shock someone at the train station looking like this," he half-joked, gesturing at himself. Adam did not bother to look where he gestured. He lingered a few steps behind Gansey, distant, as they walked towards Harps' Valley Junction. This edge of the lake was bordered by a sandy shore and high cliffs, but between these there was a winding path into the trees. Within three minutes the path grew so narrow that there was not enough room for them to walk shoulder-to-shoulder, but somehow the fact that they weren't doing that was still annoying. 

And just like this, the very last shreds of the morning's wonder and exhilaration gave way to dull irritation. If Gansey was honest with himself, it wasn't just Adam's strangeness and sudden abandonment that was irritating him. 

Alter had a king. A sleeping king, who granted wishes. 

How wonderful to have all the pieces fall into place. How terrible to have it feel so wrong when it happened. The last time Gansey had felt this askew inside, they'd found Gwenllian. A sleeper. But not the right one. And there was still one _not_ to be woken. Blue and Maura believed it was the sleeper behind the door they had found, but what if it wasn't? What if it was this the one at Alter?

He felt doubts settling around him. The countryside seemed to encourage them. This side of the lake was less wondrous than the other side. The trees were not banquets or shopping malls. They were trees. Nothing made music, except for the occasional rustle or bird call. After a few minutes, Gansey saw the tip of a red brick tower poking through the top of the foliage. He hastened his steps and nearly tripped at the edge of the wood, when he came suddenly upon a stretch that was all railroad track. 

Adam caught him and pulled him back before he could fall flat on his face. Adam was slender but all wiry muscle, with the kind of strength that went unnoticed until he really needed it. 

"Thanks," Gansey said. He supposed they were interacting now. He said, "I could have been electrocuted or something. Third rail."

Adam stared at the tracks and something in him seemed to refocus. 

"No," he said. "No third rail here. These are basic. Rails and ties on ballast. No power lines. About as basic as you can get. The train can't go very fast with tracks like these."

Gansey was not about to argue with him, having only the most basic understanding of railroad construction himself. Adam's elegant facade concealed a sharp understanding of technical details and mechanics, and, not for the first time, Gansey envied him his interior. 

Adam was different now, but there were some things Gansey would always admire about him.

Now Adam added. "Mind when you step onto the field side. You can trip on the edge of the ties."

"I don't know what that means," Gansey told him.

"It means don't trip," Adam said wryly. 

Gansey felt some of the afternoon's weight lift from him. 

It would be fine. Adam had listened. It was remarkable what a difference this made. 

They picked their way across the tracks to the platform and plain red-brick building on the other side. There was an idle locomotive there, small and cheery. A man with a blue cap pulled low over his face was crawling around underneath it and over it, wrench in hand, performing repairs. They gave him a wide berth as they crossed. Then they pulled themselves onto the platform, skirting past a man and a woman in felt hats who seemed to be comparing tickets. They crossed past the single ancient bench and peeling station sign and ducked into the small train station. 

It opened up to greet them. 

Its modest exterior was a total lie. It was a sea of benches and columns and turnstiles, a football stadium of luggage and people. Some leafed newspapers, some harassed the ticket agents. Some were squabbling children or exhausted parents. A few were lone businesspeople in suits. Several were security guards or station news sellers. There were food kiosks and shoeshine stands, an information agent and even a barber. Everyone but Gansey had a shirt. 

Gansey felt like he was in one of those naked-at-school dreams. He forced down his discomfort and struggled to reconcile the hubbub with the desolate landscape and empty platform outside. He couldn't. 

"Where do you think they're all going?" Adam asked faintly. "Not all to Alter?"

There was a large, old-fashioned signboard with estimated arrival times and destinations at one end. There were no trains to Firstborn. There were no trains to Alice's Fall. There were no trains to or from any place but Alter.

So at least they were on the right track. Rather literally. Gansey read the arrival and departure times off of the board as he led them to the ticket booth. 

"Twenty-seven fifty, negative seven-fifteen. Is that a mistake or is that like Otto's Autos?"

Things could be complete nonsense, but this did not make them mistakes. 

They found the line before the ticket booth and took their place at the rear. Three small boys darted past them, giggling at Gansey's near-nakedness. The shoeshine man wandered past deliberately, looking hopeful, eyeing Gansey's Top Siders. A station guard came by and looked at Gansey and Adam warningly. A woman struggling with many suitcases tried to catch Gansey's eye. 

"We don't know what they are," Adam reminded Gansey, before Gansey could excuse himself to go help her. 

So instead of helping, Gansey busied himself with feeling around in his pocket for his wallet. He hoped the ticket agent would accept a credit card. He assumed they would ask for hopes or years or golden harps instead. 

His fingers brushed the Cabeswater cards, and he realized that he'd never returned them to Adam. They hadn't discussed Adam's findings -- that the cards could be used up. Gansey had been too busy smarting from Adam's abandonment, and now he truly did feel sorry. While they'd fought, he'd been protected twenty-one times over, and Adam not at all, because Adam's card was soggy and shredded and useless. Gansey began to draw the pack out of his pockets.

Adam's fingers, light and barely-there, stalled him.

"Later," Adam mumbled. His eyes tracked to the side, mistrustful. A group of elderly women sat on the nearest bench, balancing their suitcases on their knees and examining Gansey severely. When they noticed Gansey staring, they each looked away. It was somehow a judgmental looking away. Gansey rolled his eyes.

"You know, if they were selkies or otter-people or train station brownies," Gansey said, "you'd think my being without a shirt wouldn't discomfit them."

Adam said, without much heat, "I don't know what discomfit means, Gansey, but, as long as you're planning on staying shirtless, it'll probably happen to anybody with blood in their veins."

He tapped the cards gently so that they slid back into Gansey's pockets. Gansey blinked at him. Even Adam's most careless asides still glanced past careful truths. But generally Adam deployed these against Ronan and not Gansey himself. 

"I don't want any of these people to see the deck," was all Adam said now, as though his earlier words weren't unusual. "Please."

Something occurred to Gansey. 

"What about the other ones?" he asked. "The ones that you can use to talk to Cabeswater. Are those--"

Adam shook his head. "Fine," he said shortly. "Wet, but they dried fast enough. I think Cabeswater did something different to those. They're like an open channel. I don't think their power will go out."

Gansey wanted to ask why Cabeswater should prioritize keeping Adam's attention over protecting Adam, but he swallowed the question. He had the answer already. It was abrupt and clear, and it tired him. He remembered watching Adam frantically excuse himself to use the Nino's payphone, on those nights he'd been expected to report to his father's carport. He wondered how Adam could bear it, then and now. The magic did not make it alright now. Magic was supposed to be _more_ than just the same old demands.

Well, he had been honest crossing the lake, honest and real. And it had not caused any catastrophes. Perhaps he could afford to be honest now. 

"Cabeswater," he asked Adam carefully, as the line edged forward, "It hasn't...marked you?"

Adam looked at him, confused.

Gansey felt the words sit heavy in his mouth, and cursed that it fell to him to explain this. A mark did not have to be a bruise. It could be a sense, something indefinable carried around the shoulders and in the tilt of the chin. A Ford Mustang could be a mark of the flashy nouveau riche, and a coating of dust on it the mark of something gone wrong. A sudden shaved head was a mark, and he supposed a wild and anarchic homemade wardrobe was another mark, albeit a lighter and more enticing one. And by now, even Gansey knew that many of Adam's surface qualities: the quiet, the occasional distance, the stubborn pride -- it all traced back to that trailer somehow. So why shouldn't Cabeswater have left its mark as well?

But Gansey could hardly mention that, to a selkie, Adam had _smelled wrong_. 

"Sometimes you seem different," was what he said instead. It was true. He had been foolish, too hopeful, in assuming that he and Adam could ever slip back to the Adam-and-Gansey of old. Adam was the Adam of Gwenllian's cave now, connected to things beyond Gansey's reach. On the lake and here in the well-lit station it was easier to face it. But an uneasy part of Gansey could not forget how horrible it had been to confront this in the dark of that cave. 

Adam said, slowly, "I don't know what you mean." 

"I talked to the Father and Mannix after you left," Gansey said. "They said they could tell that Cabeswater was in you."

Adam said nothing, but he bit his bottom lip, draining it of what little color it had. Gansey's exhaustion seemed to crest. He knew it was stupid to jump into this now, he knew he did not _want_ to, and yet a harder and older part of him felt that it was in for penny, in for a pound. 

"It was reckless," he told Adam. "You knew it was reckless to make a bargain with--"

"I thought we weren't going to talk about this," Adam bit out. "You said your piece. I thought we were done with this."

They were not done, because the selkies had confirmed that Adam had the stirrings of something dark and old and foreign inside him, something living in the trees. And in any case Gansey was realizing that it was not any particular topic that he was tired of. It was clamping down on it that tired him. It was choosing peace between them that tired him. It was not Adam's fault that Gansey had been raised to do this, not any more than it was Adam's fault that Gansey refused to urinate in the woods. But Gansey did not know if he could continue this way, plastering over everything that felt wrong. He felt the same way he'd felt arguing with Blue, and surely that was a sign that he was handling this poorly, but more than this he felt _tired_.

Adam could promise never to leave him behind. but now Gansey would never know if he could trust that. And anyway Adam wouldn't promise to listen to him when Gansey meant well, and couldn't promise to understand. And Gansey wanted that most of all.

"The things that you do," Gansey said now, "The times that magic touches you. That has _consequences_."

Adam looked enraged. 

Of course it fell to Gansey to prompt this from him. Never mind that Gansey never meant to. Why was it that whenever he tried to discuss real things with Adam, they began to argue?

"Excuse me," said the ticket agent. "You're next."

Adam's mouth snapped closed. Gansey stared at the ticket booth, and realized that the man in front of them had stepped away some time ago. They were now at the front of the line. The ticket agent looked at them both severely. 

"You're naked," she complained, when he and Adam had moved up to the booth.

"I'm not wearing a shirt," Gansey corrected crisply. He wanted to be accurate about these things. 

"Well, I can't sell tickets to you this way!" she said. "When I see a half-naked man, I can't think of tickets at all."

This was such an unexpected pronouncement that Adam gave a laugh, startled and awkward. 

"It's not funny," she said crossly. "It's a public nuisance."

No one had ever before told Gansey he was any such thing. He raised an eyebrow at her.

"If you can't sell the tickets to me, then sell them to him," he instructed, nodding in Adam's direction. But then he caught sight of the signboard with its vast white letters, its trains that went nowhere but exactly where they needed to go.

So, although Adam said, "Two to Alter, please, ma'am--" Gansey said, "Why _are_ there no trains to anywhere else?"

"I don't know!" hissed the ticket agent, very determinedly not looking at him. "Why ask me? Ask the conductor. I'm not the conductor! That's not my job!"

"What's the price--" Adam said.

"I don't care!" she said. She slapped two tickets on the counter in front of them."Oh, I wish you'd leave! I don't like this. I don't like this at all. Every train down but the ones to Alter and you come in and you're not from here at all. Oh, please just go!"

"Not from here at all--" Gansey began.

But now Adam dragged him away.

"I think we want to get out of here," he told Gansey worriedly. "Look around, Gansey. Look at them with this."

He pressed yet another card into Gansey's hands, despite his earlier caution. It made the station look different.

Everyone looked a little faded, a little indistinct around the edges. The woman with the luggage turned and -- for a moment -- disappeared, as though she were two-dimensional and turning on her side revealed the flatness of her. Gansey blinked, trying to make sense of it. Adam pulled him away. As they returned to the platform, they nearly tripped over the running children. The children sang tunelessly, a little oddly, like their voices were coming from very far away. A businessman having his shoes shined became, for a moment, merely the shadow of a businessman.

It was disconcerting. A station full of people who were not quite there. 

"They don't want to be here," Adam muttered, as though he could hear Gansey's thoughts. "They want to leave, but they can't, because all the trains are down except the ones to Alter."

The last thing Gansey wanted to hear was Adam reciting the thoughts of phantom people.

But then they were out on the platform in the cool sunshine, no phantoms anywhere. It felt like stepping out of a dank cave, leaving the earth behind and seeing the sky again. They each exhaled hard, suddenly lighter than before. They dropped side by side onto the bench, crowding the people in felt hats. It was several minutes before anyone spoke.

When someone did, it was not Gansey or Adam.

"I can't help but notice that your tickets say Alter," said a friendly, familiar voice. They whistled after they said it. Cheerfully. Tunelessly. Gansey looked up and saw scarred, calloused hands. A scarred face.

"It's your lucky day! The train is a dream. Runs like a dream. But it only ever goes--"

"To Alter, Tierney," snapped one of the felt hat people. The man. "We _know_. It only goes to Alter."

"Tierney...?" Gansey echoed.

The felt-hat man who had spoken looked at him sympathetically. He had a frank, handsome face. Wide-set eyes. Virginia mountain eyes. And he wasn't a shadow. He was very real.

"Met him before, have you?" the real man said. "There's nothing for it. These parts, you'll find Tierneys everywhere."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have an update. Hope it brightened your day. And if it didn't, then I hope something else comes along and brightens your day.

**Author's Note:**

> Please consider dropping me a comment if you like this! Sorry about the insects.


End file.
